


Viking Invasion

by JessaLRynn



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Humor, M/M, Not a Love Story, Sailing, Time Travel, Vikings, some love story maybe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-02-10 20:25:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 30,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2038911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessaLRynn/pseuds/JessaLRynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A resort in the middle of nowhere gets a few unexpected guests. And then a few more. The Doctor, Jack, and Rose are in for an adventure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Enter the Vikings

Like so many things, these days, Rose supposed this mess technically started with Jack. For once, he hadn't done anything on purpose, or actually anything wrong at all, as the Doctor would, surprisingly enough, be the first to admit. Jack had just managed to get himself injured, and everything had sort of... cataclysmed from there.

Jack had taken a strong light burst from some sort of crystal during their last trip. The Doctor had had the medicine necessary to correct Jack's vision, to make sure he would see again, but the Time Lord had been almost horrified when he realized he only had two doses. He could replicate the drug, but it would take several days, and would cost one of the doses. The drug, of course, couldn't be acquired through any legitimate channels, for some reason which Rose had never managed to understand.

What it meant was that Jack had been stuck with one eye well and one eye covered by a dark patch to prevent any light from reaching it and making his temporary blindness even worse. The Doctor had given him drops to treat it, and Jack hadn't complained even a little bit, which surprised Rose until she realized that Jack had fully expected to be rendered blind, forced to have his eyes replaced, by the damage.

The Doctor had decided to take them someplace safe, a small, uncharted little backwater out in M135, which was populated by a tiny handful of very very wealthy and very very reclusive retired so-and-sos from several different planets. He'd landed them on a beach, but wouldn't come out with them, and then Jack had felt self-concious with his depth perception off and without his vivid green eyes to charm (he hadn't considered that the eye patch gave him a sort of pirate-like appeal). So he'd stayed inside to help the Doctor. Rose had gone out on her own, to find a small coastal town, an abandoned beach, and weather to absolutely die for. It was completely safe, not a problem in sight, hadn't been even a petty crime here in generations.

She'd given the beach up as dull around lunch time and, after failing to persuade, bully, or bribe the Doctor into joining her, had gone up into the small village. It was, apparently, a service town for the recluses, populated and operated by selected close-mouthed types who'd sell their souls before a private picture of the people who provided their livelihood. They'd all looked at her quite askance, as people weren't supposed to be here without absolute reams of clearance paperwork and everyone therefore knew everyone else. Rose had simply claimed her mysterious employer had given her her first day off since bringing her here. It had the advantage of being half-way true-ish. Everyone had instantly turned sympathetic and understanding, completely familiar with the rare tragic case like hers.

Rose hadn't inquired what sort of tragic case they thought she was, just settled herself in to play cards and share a drink and talk trash with the servants of the rich and famous. It really was a bit fun, this, almost like being down the pub at her mum's, with the added advantage that she could go home and away from this once she was done.

It had been, all in all, a beautifully perfect summer day. Even when the foul weather rolled in off the sea late that afternoon, Rose had been content in the knowledge that she was dry and cozy and understood, the Doctor could ring her if necessary, and everything was nice and happy and safe as houses.

Still, it all boiled down to Jack being injured, leading to this entire chain of events. Rose stuck hard to that fact, because as soon as the Doctor became aware that she was running for her life across the beach, she was absolutely certain he was going to try to pin this one on her. After all, only jeopardy-friendly Rose Tyler could possibly be the cause of the sudden, inexplicable Viking invasion.

*?*

"Pull the green one," the Doctor said. "No, the _other_ green one," he added, and he sounded like his patience was at an end.

"D'you know how many of these wires are green, Doc?" Jack demanded, and his patience had also stepped out. He suspected it was in the library, in the liquor cabinet, where he would also very much like to be right about now.

The Doctor snagged the sonic screwdriver, the force hammer and, inexplicably, a roll of duct tape. "Don't care if it's been broken since before I was born," he muttered, "I'm gonna bleedin' fix it, an' you're gonna live with it."

Yep, it was bad now, all right. He was talking - aloud and comprehensibly - to the ship.

"I said I'd not go near the chameleon circuit an' I won't." He banged the duct tape down on the console and whirred the screwdriver over a long series of switches, which all went "click", ominously, at the same time. "What possible difference would it make if I did rewire it through the recall cir..." He stopped what he was doing, shut off the screwdriver, and looked around. "Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?" asked Jack, who couldn't hear anything but the swishing, flowing, ponging silence of the TARDIS at rest. And maybe some rain.

The Doctor held up a hand, the one with the screwdriver in it, his head tilted to one side as he moved across the grating like a hunter in an old film - only much more gracefully. You tended to forget, really, when the Doctor wandered around all bandy-legged and lanky, that the predatory edge of a jungle cat was hiding just out of sight. His head tilted further, and he made several steps toward the door. "Viewer, Jack, now," he snapped, and jumped the open grating, flipping the door locks open as he went.

The viewer came up and revealed a scene that, in Jack's opinion, would never fail to inspire - Rose Tyler, soaking wet, in skimpy clothes, running across a beach. "What's she running from, though?" Jack asked aloud.

"Blue button, down 'til it stops," the Doctor replied. He was next to the doors, now.

"Doc, you need to see this!" Jack shouted.

"No time," the Doctor said.

"No, really. I think... Doctor, it looks like she's running from Vikings."

The Doctor stared at Jack, blue eyes wide and horrified, and then he flung open the doors, leaving the TARDIS at a dead run. Jack started to follow him, then pivoted on his heel and went to grab his blaster first.

*?*

The Doctor raced across the sand in the pouring rain, his boots kicking up great white clumps as he went. It was hard to maintain his footing, and it had to be harder for Rose since she'd probably been wearing nonsensical little shoes, nothing with traction at all. If she fell, if she went down for even a second, those barbarians would be all over her, and the Doctor was not about to let that happen.

This probably wasn't the best plan, not really, but the Doctor figured he could do something impressive, say something, distract them, challenge them, anything. He had a lot better chance against a screaming horde than Rose did.

He also appeared to have a hammer, as he obviously hadn't dropped it. At this point, he decided it would do for a reasonable facsimile of a credible threat, at least until Jack could get back with the fire power. The Doctor had seen true beserkers in action. If these were the real thing, death was the only option. However, with Viking beserkers, it was possible, even likely, that they were just running amok under the blood-lust and could be brought back to themselves by a single hard jolt.

He could hear Rose's shrieks quite clearly now, equal parts fear and rage, and she was calling for him. He could hear the laughing, taunting, and jeering of her pursuers. Likely not true beserkers then - it was usually all rage in a real psycho-traumatic killing frenzy.

He topped a dune and the lightning lit up the blackened sky well enough to see quite clearly, even through the rain. Rose staggered, blinded by the light, and the Doctor reached out and caught her arm. She fought and kicked wet sand at him, until he let her hand slip down to join with him. The second their fingers interlocked, she knew his. Shoving the rain and her wet hair out of her face, she shouted, "This isn't my fault!"

The Doctor jerked her the rest of the way up the hill and shoved her behind his body. "Run!" he snapped over his shoulder.

"No!" Rose snapped back.

"Jack's coming, he's bringing his blaster, run!"

"If Jack's bringing his blaster, you're still gonna need someone who can see what they're shooting at. Leaves me, since you won't, and I can knee-cap the lot of 'em."

The Doctor took his eyes off the Vikings - and their senseless yelling - long enough to turn, tower over Rose, and shout, "Do as you're told!" over the sound of the wind.

"What'd you do?" Rose asked.

"Wha...?" the Doctor started, and trailed off, realizing what she meant. The Vikings, every last one of them, had gone quiet.

The Doctor watched in surprise as the very largest of them staggered half-way up the dune and then dropped to his knees. Confusion etched on his face, the Time Lord shrugged at his little human and she shrugged back. "Ya don't hafta do that," he said, raising his hands in a placating gesture.

No one could hear a word of it over the sudden, titanic detonation of thunder.

All of the Vikings dropped to their knees.

Certain he hadn't been this bewildered by human behavior in a very, very long time, the Doctor looked to Rose for an explanation. "You're so impressive?" she offered dubiously.

Jack charged up the dune beside them. "What's happening?" he demanded, his blaster as leveled as he could manage at the nearest Viking.

At the sound of his voice, the Vikings had all looked up. Jack looked back at the kneeling, bowing barbarians in surprise.

Lightning split the sky again.

The Vikings broke and ran.


	2. Mostly Ignoring Rose

"What the hell just happened?" Jack demanded.

"Never mind what," Rose shouted over him. "How the hell did that just happen? I mean _Vikings_? Who looks at a resort and says, 'ya know what, this needs Vikings'."

"Las Vegas," Jack replied without missing a beat.

"Other than them," Rose shot back.

The Doctor shook himself and started back toward the TARDIS, and Rose was immediately right behind him. "This isn't right, is it? I mean, this planet's not supposed ta have their own Eric the Red or something, are they?"

"No," the Doctor replied, tersely.

"Aren't we gonna go after them?" Jack asked.

"Oh, God, the villagers!" Rose exclaimed. Her hand came up to tug at the Doctor's jacket. "We gotta help them," she insisted.

"We can't," the Doctor replied.

"But this can't possibly be supposed to happen," Rose insisted. "They're from Earth, no where near here..."

"Exactly," the Doctor cut her off. "Which means someone is playing around with something they shouldn't, an' the best way we can help everyone involved is ta find out what the hell's goin' on an' stop it."

Jack and Rose looked at each other and shrugged. "All right," Jack said. "Then why did they run off?"

"No idea," the Doctor admitted, his tone as clipped and hurried as his stride across the sand. Rose was having to run to keep up with him and even Jack was having trouble with the pace.

He was furious. Rose could see it in every tense line of his frame as he moved. Someone was playing with time, obviously. Nothing else set him off like this, nothing, except maybe Daleks, and even that was more likely to be a sudden murderous rage followed by nearly debilitating grief.

Even she had gotten shouted at good and proper for messing up the natural order of time, and she'd deserved it, even if she hadn't understood what she'd done at the time. By the time she realized she'd single-handedly destroyed the world and the Last of the Time Lords, her father had worked it all out. The only thing true about Pete Tyler that Jackie had ever told Rose was that he was a genius. In the space of a few stolen hours, he'd learned about time travel, paradoxes, fatherhood, and saving the world. Rose had that precious while, yet she would have traded it gladly to have never hurt the Doctor like that.

Even time travel was like that, she'd discovered, full of perfect hindsight. And only the Doctor could see in both directions.

*?*

"Right," said the Doctor, bounding up to the viewer and stabbing buttons near it, "I'd guess what we're lookin' at is a malfunctioning time corridor."

Jack set himself the task of replacing the loose flooring while Rose coiled up the wires that were lying exposed around the console room. He listened to the Doctor attentively, but only understood maybe one word in every seven or so. He figured he was doing better than Rose, because she looked lost at "time corridor" and her face hadn't cleared up yet.

The advantage he had, he supposed, had been due to his years as a Time Agent, but that hadn't prepared him for the sheer breadth and scope of a Time Lord's knowledge. While Jack could go into a time period and take a guess that something might be not right, the Doctor knew immediately. Sometimes he had to hunt the details down, but he always knew how to fix things to get them back on track. This time line, the Vikings, the planet, everything about it was wrong. The Doctor and the TARDIS were the only chance the Universe had to fix it.

"Ah hah!" the Doctor shouted triumphantly. Rose dropped what she was doing and raced to his side, the Doctor's grin contagious, and hers reflecting and amplifying. They were almost unbelievably beautiful, those two. She bounced with enthusiasm while the Doctor pointed out on the screen what he'd found. Jack crowded in behind them and looked over Rose's head, but all he could see was an endless scrolling of circular symbols.

"See, it's here. One of the edges of it's broken open, so whatever's being taken is starting to leak out, fallin' all over the place like a handful of loose change. It's very, very old, this one, so it was bound ta happen sooner or later. Can't think why I've never noticed it before, it's enormous."

"What kind of enormous?" Jack asked, because he knew the Doctor could mean lengthwise, sizewise, or even temporal scope.

"The origin point is somewhere out past Gal-9 Spectronica. That's Stellastarry on your maps, Jack."

"No way!" Jack protested.

"Impossible, I know," the Doctor agreed. "Hardly anything out there but burnt out cinders and the occasional rogue dwarf star. Termination point's..." He paused, tapped a switch, and waited for the data to scroll forward, his grin vanishing completely to be replaced by a concerned frown.

"Lemmee guess," said Rose. "Earth."

The Doctor grinned again. "Very good, Rose Tyler," he said. "Very, very good."

He finally laid down the force hammer he'd been carrying, and the vivid blue glow around the head of it went out. Rose looked inexplicably startled, as if she hadn't noticed it before. Meanwhile, the Doctor started tapping away on that old style keyboard in the console, the one with the normal keys that didn't do even one normal thing. "Let's narrow it down a bit," he said. "Earth's a small place, 'til ya have ta search the whole thing for a temporal anomaly."

"Were you carrying that the whole time?" Rose asked, pointing at the hammer.

"Not Norway," the Doctor said, thoughtfully. "Hum. All right, we'll try out in Newfoundland."

"Jack," Rose insisted, "was he carrying that when we were out with the Vikings?"

"I guess," Jack answered absently. "Any luck, Doc?"

"Not a sausage," the Doctor complained. "Iceland?"

"Sounds good," Jack agreed.

"And you've got an eye patch," Rose added.

"Blast!"

"No joy?" said Jack.

"Nothin'..."

"An' I seem to remember something 'bout the eyes, too," Rose continued. "S'like, they were weird, or whatever."

"Have you tried a cross-sino-trans-vectored frequency?" Jack asked.

"A what?"

"I know why the Vikings ran off," Rose announced.

"Upper blue range?" Jack offered hesitantly.

"Oh. Omega cross-patch, yeah." The Doctor shrugged. "Nothin' there, either."

"Why don't you two ever listen to me?" Rose shouted.

"What?" the Doctor and Jack both demanded, rounding on the indignant human girl with annoyance plain on both their faces.

"Listen, Rose, this thing is..." Jack began.

"Haven't got time," the Doctor started at the same time. "We need to locate..."

"They think you're gods," Rose interrupted dryly. "Just so you know."

They both stared at her.

Rose threw her hands up in the air. "Don't you ever read?" she exclaimed. At both of their looks of incredulity, she stalked toward the interior door. "And try Bermuda," she threw back over her shoulder before she slammed the door behind her.

"Touchy," the Doctor said.

"Women," Jack agreed. "Don't you usually keep chocolate around for her or something?"

"What?" the Doctor asked, tapping at the keyboard again. "Oh, tha's not 'til next week," he added.

Staring at the Doctor in astonishment for knowing something about Rose that was usually a lover's privilege (necessity for the protection of life and limb) apparently didn't do any good towards getting answers. So Jack just made a mental note (protection of life and limb) and started to ask.

"Ah hah, got it! Fantastic!"

Or not.


	3. Go to Valhalla

"You were right," the Doctor said, approaching Rose rather cautiously, as he couldn't read her mood when she was sitting at the kitchen table with her back to him.

Well, he could, but that was not only cheating, it was dangerous. Well, dangerously tempting... never mind. The point was, his human friend was drinking tea and ignoring him, and he didn't like it at all. "Rose?" he asked.

"Yeah, I heard you. I was expecting the TARDIS to explode."

The Doctor frowned. "Oi, you've been right before, an' I said so."

Rose turned and smiled. "I know, m'sorry. I'm just... I got a shock today, that's all. Ignore me."

"Were you hurt, Rose? With the Vikings?"

"No. They just came outta nowhere." She shrugged, then grinned at him, even if it was a little forced. "S'not every day we humans get ta hang out with the God of Thunder, ya know."

The Doctor blinked, then felt his own face explode into a grin that matched Rose's. "I didn't even think o' that," he said. "But how'd they get Thor, then? I'm pretty sure he was ginger."

Rose waved a hand as if to conjure something. "He was a god, though, right, an' they can disguise themselves. Besides, you had that bloody great glowing hammer, an' your eyes aren't exactly dull, either."

"You pay a lot of attention to my eyes, Rose Tyler?" the Doctor couldn't resist asking.

Rose's head tilted to the side and her tongue poked out at the edge of her smile. "Why you ask, Doctor?" she teased.

The Doctor started to reply, even though he didn't know exactly what he'd say. Rose just had this way about her, something sweet and dangerous at once and the Doctor found he could never resist her gentle flirtation. He might wish she didn't spread it around so much, but the sensible part of him that knew there were more dangerous things about their relationship than her attractive charms considered it best if she never knew he ever considered that.

He was spared any deeper descent into insanity by the sudden appearance of Jack, saying they were on Earth. The Doctor would be damned if he admitted that he actually resented the hell out of the interruption.

*?*

"What exactly are we doing?" Jack asked, leaning on his side of the console, tapping two keys alternately, one every six seconds. Ironically enough, it was just what the Doctor ordered.

Rose, who was ping-ponging a series of levers as the Doctor called them out, gave him an exasperated glare. "He already said - following the corridor."

Jack would have glared at her and said he really wanted a more detailed answer, as he knew that bit, but there wasn't time. The Doctor called out, "Rose, red switch and hold it down. It'll try ta fight you - we're passing the gap - but don't let go, or we'll end up in the middle of nowhere."

"Prehistoric Cardiff," she suggested, and pounced on the switch.

"Oi, that's not the right one."

"Still think we oughtta test you for color-blindness," she said, and toggled a large brass switch with the word "Red" scrawled on it in what Jack thought was probably Rose's handwriting.

"Thatta girl!" the Doctor sang out. Rose beamed at him until she realized he was petting the console as he bounced past her, and her grin faded.

Jack snickered at her. She stuck her tongue out at him. "No flirtin' from the ape contingent, please," the Doctor said. "This is important." Jack assumed he was the only one who saw Rose stick her tongue out at the Doctor, since the gesture passed without comment.

The next few minutes were hair-raising, really, as the old Time Ship lurched and dove and flipped through the time corridor's narrow confines. Jack supposed it'd gotten quite used to hogging the entire Vortex, and didn't much care to be told it was limited to a certain tiny temporal sub-pocket (or whatever Time Lords called them - he was learning that he and the Doctor had different words for some of the most basic concepts).

"Right, on three, Rose, let go that switch and shift to the other red one. Jack, hold both keys down hard. An' hang on tight, both of you, 'cuz this is gonna be nasty."

Jack shot Rose a look to say goodbye. "Doctor, it's been a privilege," he said calmly.

"Shut up," said Rose, faking confidence. Then, apparently because the Doctor didn't say anything to correct Jack, she added, softly, "Thank you, Doctor. Wouldn't've missed it."

"One," the Doctor said. "Rose, I'm still so glad I met you."

"What about me?" Jack asked.

"Two," the Doctor said. "Thanks for everything, Jack."

"Yeah, thanks," Rose agreed.

"See you in Valhalla," Jack said brightly.

"Three," the Doctor announced. His hands blurred over the console, seeming to be everywhere at once. Jack held down his assigned keys and Rose jumped on her switch, one hand holding it, the other reaching, as if by instinct, for the Doctor.

They were looking into each other's eyes as the whole world seemed to blur itself to screaming white noise. Jack wondered what it would be like to be loved like that.

*?*

"Ow," said the voice she most loved in all the universe.

Rose, who couldn't see for the multi-colored specks dancing in front of her eyes, blinked and tried to move toward the sound.

Another voice, familiar and well-liked, said something positively filthy.

"Rose?" came that wonderful voice again, saying her name in that way it had of making her heart flutter every time.

Rose groaned softly and stirred groggily, trying to figure out where she was, how she got here, what was going on, what that exquisite smell was, anything.

"Still with me?" came the gentle inquiry.

Rose decided she was perfectly comfortable, where ever she was, and balled up tighter, burying her nose closer to the warmth and the intoxicating fragrance so near her face. There was that all-encompassing double throb, the sound of her true home, right next to her ear. She was safe, she was warm, she was perfectly fine to just stay right here, forever.

"You gotta wake up now, precious girl," the Doctor murmured, deliciously, next to her ear.

"Don' wanna," Rose mumbled. "Comfy."

The Doctor whispered, "Me too, Rose. But..."

"You guys are so cute!" Jack's voice rang out from well above where ever they were.

Rose blinked blearily and forced her eyes to stay open. It was hard to focus, as she appeared to have her face buried in soft wool jumper and leather jacket. She tried to move but she appeared to be thoroughly tangled up. "Doctor?" she questioned.

The hand that appeared to be tangled in her hair moved slowly. "Yeah?"

"Are we in the TARDIS?"

"Yeah."

"Good," Rose decided. "And are my legs wrapped up in yours?"

"Pretty much," he agreed. "Lot taller than you, ya know."

"And Jack's laughing at us?"

"That'd be him," the Doctor agreed, accusation in his tone.

"So we survived? That's good, isn't it?"

"Think so," he agreed. "Not sure about our dignity, though."

"Do we have any?" Rose wondered.

The Doctor chuckled, and the rumbling under her chest felt wonderful. Rose decided now would be a very very good time to move before the Doctor became aware of what was happening to her. She tried to squirm off of him, and the chuckling was interrupted by an abrupt gasp. "Hold still," he ordered tersely.

Next thing Rose knew, she was standing up, the Doctor's arms supporting her as her head swam and her feet tried to collapse out from under her.

"Is she all right?" Jack asked, and he sounded a bit concerned, at last, as opposed to utterly amused.

"S'like jet-lag," the Doctor said. "Sure it's happened ta you before, too. You humans are very adaptable creatures, but things can shock your systems some times."

"I suppose it's never happened to you?" Jack asked in a tone that was scathing and amused at once.

"Nah," the Doctor said. "S'like the magic kids in Harry Potter stories, how they're always doin' stuff accidentally when they're real young? My species does the same thing, only with time."

Rose wanted to say something about him thinking he was so impressive, but what came out was garbled at best and more than likely complete nonsense.

"What do we need to do to make her better?" Jack asked hesitantly.

"Just needs water an' some rest. I'll go put her ta bed, an' we can go see about this trouble."

Rose forcefully pulled herself together. "I'm fine," she said, suddenly and determinedly. "Just needed a minute, I'm better now."

The Doctor grinned at her. "Have it your way, Rose Tyler."

"I will, thanks," she said firmly. "Not gonna let you two have all the fun without me."

The Time Lord smirked. "Wouldn't be the same," he said, and handed her a bottle of water he'd conjured from somewhere. "Drink that and we'll get going."

Despite Jack shaking his head and sniggering at her, Rose finished the water gratefully, then took the Doctor's hand. "What're we likely to find?" she asked.

"No tellin'," the Doctor admitted. "We should be skirting the edges of the source, an' we'll need to make for the center. I think, under the circumstances, it'd be safest if we kept a tight hold on one another before we stepped out there."

Jack laughed. "Hey, I'm always game for a cuddle," he offered flirtatiously.

The Doctor's answer was drier than entire deserts. "I don't doubt it."

Rose leaned against the Doctor's arm and held on tight. Jack exchanged a glance with him and moved to her other side, holding on to her other arm. As the TARDIS doors opened, she was quite safely wedged between two of her favorite people in the whole universe. They all stepped forward to see what they would be entering.

Then, there was a blinding sweep of golden light, and Rose felt as if every single part of her body was being wrenched away from every other part. There was a sound like screaming and she was almost certain she could only hear it because it was her own. Everything separated, parted ways, tore. There was the sensation of something titanic and powerful wreathing through her, trying to clutch her close. The scream lost coherence and Rose was terrified to think it was because she'd lost her lungs.

Then, there was silence.


	4. Oh the Places We'll Go

As the anomaly raged and flowed around them, the Doctor tried everything to hold onto Rose and Jack, Rose especially because she couldn't defend herself as easily. The anomaly wasn't too strong for him but it was too quick. It had hold of her, tearing her apart and away from him before he could get even a cursory grip on her to mind. He only hoped she understood through the screaming wave of her terror what he was telling her, that he would find her, that she would be safe.

He hoped she was safe. No, he knew she had to be safe because nothing else was an option.

Finding Jack was inevitable. The boy would know to head for the center of this mess, too. He needed to find Rose, get to the source, shut the thing down, and get the three of them out of here. With any luck, Jack was still with Rose and would protect her.

Calmly, he closed and locked the TARDIS door, then stepped through the anomaly. He opened his eyes as the brief disorientation passed and found himself staring down the point of a sword.

"Who are you, oh man of Golden Mists, and what do you mean by this?"

The Doctor glared at the Viking on the other end of the sword and managed, with a great deal of effort, to refrain from rolling his eyes.

*?*

Jack was washed up on an abandoned shore of reality, and it surprised him a bit that the afterlife existed. After he gradually got over that shock, he was even more shocked to discover that the afterlife felt an awful lot like wooden planking.

"Pirate," a voice that wasn't an angel's muttered fiercely.

Should have known heaven wouldn't have him, but he was surprised that hell hadn't been too worried to keep them around. The Doctor was liable to blow the place to smithereens, given a single percent of a chance, and Rose would probably seduce the Devil himself into the religion of following her blinding smile. She could charm the last Lord of Time - pure Evil wouldn't stand a chance.

"Too clean to be a pirate," another voice contradicted. "Probably just another lost soul damned to this pointless, endless hell."

See, he knew it was hell. He considered for a few moments that they might better move before the Doctor got around to blowing it up, but it occurred to him that hell might keep him and leave the Doctor behind. The Time Lord seemed to do a good enough job punishing himself in Jack's considered opinion. He wouldn't need specialists. Rose, of course, was too good for hell, no question, and they'd probably know better than to keep her, since the Doctor would tear it down, bare-handed, if she was kept from him.

So maybe, Jack decided, that meant he was alone. He opened his eyes. One was still lost in darkness, but the other could clearly see faces that looked nothing like the lesser demons he was expecting.

In fact, they looked like ordinary men. Specifically, his training informed him, they were members of the American Continental Navy, circa 1780 or so. One was a Midshipman, the other a Lieutenant, if Jack remembered his early United States history correctly. Jack wobbled to his feet. "Captain Jack Harkness," he stated, calmly. "What ship is this, gentlemen?"

"This is the _USS Saratoga_ ," the Lieutenant reported as he and the midshipman snapped to attention.

"At ease," Jack said. "We've been looking for this ship for awhile now," he lied. "Where's your captain?"

"We ran into a storm, sir. Captain Young and the First Mate were lost." The Lieutenant looked horribly distressed at this admission, and Jack could certainly understand that. John Young was a bloody legend, if Jack had all his memories sorted out correctly.

"Right," he said. "What's our bearing? Do we have any idea where we are?"

"No, sir," the Lieutenant admitted. "It's... well, sir, come out onto the deck and see for yourself."

Jack followed the pair out of the cabin he'd apparently landed in and up a small wooden ladder standard on these old sailing vessels. As soon as they reached the deck, he immediately spotted the first problem. Above them, the sky hung, black and blank and endless. There was absolutely nothing like a star up there, nothing to plot a heading by, nothing to give even the vaguest hint of where they might have ended up.

He looked over the side and immediately became aware of the second problem.

*?*

Rose's brain staggered back into consciousness with the immediate conviction that she was completely alone. She opened her eyes and frowned. Yep, alone. No one anywhere near her, and no idea where she was. "Doctor!" she called out.

No answer.

"Jack!"

Still nothing. Not only that, but it proved that there was no one here at all, because someone would have probably responded to her shouts even if it wasn't the people called.

Carefully, she took in her surroundings. She seemed to be in some sort of armory. Every wall was covered with weapons, everything from knives and daggers and swords all the way up to the blasters and laser rifles she'd seen Jack toy with on various planets they'd visited.

After a few minutes, though, Rose noticed something decidedly odd about the theoretical armory. Simply put, it was too posh. There was soft, fluffy, grandly designed carpet beneath her feet, Persian if she didn't miss her guess. The table or desk behind her looked like it was made of mahogany or some other wood that shone so brightly it glowed. There was a computer terminal sitting on it, but one check found the terminal dead.

She wasn't a prisoner, because no one was here to have taken her prisoner. She wasn't a guest, because if she was, someone would have showed by now just to check or something. She was obviously just lost, maybe washed up here in that whatever the hell happened when she and the Doctor and Jack stepped out of the TARDIS.

On the other hand, things that tried to separate the three of them probably didn't have good intentions. Still, she knew with complete certainty that the Doctor would come for her. She felt, somewhere inside her, like he was whispering to her that he would find her, that nothing would keep him from bringing her back to him.

Rose decided to meet him halfway, and to do that she needed to get out of here. She also decided that she might need to defend herself, just in case the rest of her surroundings weren't so empty.

She wouldn't carry a gun, though. The Doctor didn't like them and, although Jack had taught her to shoot straight (much to the Doctor's annoyance), Rose herself didn't care for something that gave her that much chance of killing someone even by accident. She went after the bladed weapons instead, finally selecting what looked to her like a small enough sword that she could carry it, encourage people to leave her alone, and not hurt anyone too much.

Plus, you never really knew when a good long stick might come in handy.

*?*

"It looks like some sort of graveyard," commented young Midshipman Smith, as he and Jack and the Lieutenant - named Taylor - made their way up to the helm.

"That's exactly it," Jack said. "And not what you usually think of when you hear the phrase 'Graveyard of the Atlantic'. And where is everyone? This ship's complement is usually larger, isn't it?"

"It's eighty-six crew and officers," the Lieutenant agreed. "But we had to leave a crew with the last prize we took, and then we lost half the complement in the last storm. Smith and I are the only line officers left on board."

"And me, now," Jack said. "Right. Has there been any wind at all?"

"Nothing steady, and no way to predict when it's coming. We tried to time it or predict it, but there's nothing to work with. The sky is always black. We're running low on water."

"What about this stuff?" Jack asked, gesturing over the rails. "Is it fresh?"

Smith and Taylor blinked at each other. "We didn't think to check. How can we have left the ocean?"

"Honestly?" said Jack. "I don't know. But the compasses don't work -" He looked at the men and got nods of confirmation. "The sky's always black, and we're still alive. Something must be happening, and I think we need to get there to find out what."

"How will we do that without anything to navigate by?" Taylor questioned, annoyed.

"We'll use the wrecks," Jack said. "Whatever's happening, it's probably at the center, right?"

"Right," the other two agreed.

"So we'll navigate as close as we can to where the wrecks are thickest, and then we'll use boarding hooks to find the cause."

The two officers looked both thrilled and relieved. Then the great big green whatsits fell out of the sky about thirty miles further into the wrecks. "There's our heading," Jack decided. This time, the other two looked at him like he was insane.


	5. Stealing Thunder

The Vikings were making the Doctor grind his teeth together. They wouldn't accept anything that resembled the truth - like that he didn't know how they'd gotten there, didn't know how to get them out, couldn't explain where the ocean went, and didn't know what would happen when they found out who had done all this. They wouldn't even accept that he was "The Doctor" - they just insisted on calling him "Man of the Mists." He was wasting time, valuable time that he simply didn't have to waste. He needed to find Rose, and he needed to figure out how to reverse this problem. Quickly.

A large, vividly green, and smoking ship soared overhead and crashed into the water about ten miles deeper into the labyrinth of wrecked ships. It looked to the Doctor to be of Synesthesian design, circa the 55th century, but he wouldn't know for sure until he got a better look at it, if he ever did. Rather than this proving to the Vikings that he didn't know what was going on, they decided that the Doctor had brought the ship to destroy them. They decided they were going to have to blood-eagle him on the deck, just to let Odin know they were there.

"Oi," the Doctor snapped, the entire store of patience he had remaining for the rest of this incarnation at the very end of its tether, "if I was gonna destroy you, I'd've destroyed you and you'd've stayed destroyed."

"His eyes..." one of the Vikings at the back whispered to one of the others.

That reminded him. He normally didn't do this, but there wasn't time. People were in danger, more ships coming in by the minute, and the vessels weren't coming from only one time period, which meant the thing was completely out of hand. "You wanna know what's goin' on? None of you lot are s'posed ta be here. You've been trapped into a game well above your mortal heads, an' if ya don't wanna help Loki win, you can just shut it."

"Who do you claim to be then, Man of the Mists?" demanded the oldest and crankiest Viking of the lot. The Doctor had, in the privacy of his own head, named him _Steinengehirne_ or, to be simple about it, Rocks-for-Brains.

"Who do I look like?" he asked, and the Oncoming Storm rattled in his words. He might as well be this culture's Thunder God, too. He was for the Kaleds, after all.

All of the Vikings, except Rocks-for-Brains, immediately decided he was, indeed, the God of Thunder with the storied intense eyes. "If you are Thor, then where is Mjolnir?"

"If I had that, d'ya think I'd be worryin' with you lot? I'm lookin' for Odin an'..." Uh oh. Couldn't say Rose was Freya, they'd expect to see Brisingamen when he found her. They might believe Thor without his hammer - that had happened at least once in the legends. But not Freya without her necklace. And he wasn't about to hand her over to Jack, even if he did like the lad and trust him, so that let Frigg out. The Doctor shook his head, hoped to any gods that might listen to stupid Time Lords with their feet always in their mouths that her Norse Mythology came from comic books, and finished with, "Sif."

Several of the Vikings looked thoroughly alarmed and even Rocks-for-Brains seemed to reconsider his position. "Loki has taken her?"

"Not yet, I don't think, but I need ta get to her before he does. You lot can either help or get outta my way, 'cuz I'm gonna find her, if I have ta go through the lot of you."

*?*

Rose had realized by now that she was on some kind of space ship. It was old, she was sure of that much, really, really old, because parts of it made the TARDIS look fresh off the assembly line. Since the Time Ship was, apparently, quite a bit older than her nine hundred year old owner (did they Doctor own the TARDIS, or did the TARDIS own the Doctor?) that was honestly saying something.

The silence in the ship was deafening and, Rose had long since decided, decidedly creepy. She tolerated it as long as she could, but every echo of her foot-falls started to sound like someone chasing her and every door swishing open as she passed nearly made her scream. After the third time her own clanging across the deck nearly forced her heart to burst out of her chest, Rose decided that the only way to get through this sane was to distract herself.

She started singing. The first song that came to mind and therefore from her lips was a love song, of course. She wasn't surprised, not with the state of her heart these days.

Rose wasn't even sure when it happened. Some time after "run", but it couldn't have been any later than, "I'm so glad I met you," she fell in love with her best friend. That was the thing that scared her the most, not that he was an alien or so much older than her, not even that he honestly thought himself some kind of murderer, but the fact that he was her best friend.

She'd had best friends before, but it was Mickey who made her worry. It wasn't that she couldn't break up with him, it was that she had wanted to break up with him, even before she met the Doctor. She'd only gone out with Mickey because he was her best friend at the time, because she felt like her damaged heart was safe in his hands. He must have felt safe with her, too, boring Rose Tyler who lived in the adjacent block of flats, the little girl who fell off her bike and bled on him when he was fifteen. She didn't have to have sex with him to be his girlfriend, she didn't even have to be nice to him. They acted exactly the same as they had always done, they just called themselves something different.

With the Doctor, Rose knew it would be different. For one thing, there was absolutely no way her heart was safe with him. One day, he would choose to save the world and not her. If she didn't manage to save herself, she'd be broken by it, or die of it. He'd never pick her above the lives of random strangers. It was even possible there were bad people he'd try harder to save than her. She knew from experience that it wouldn't half kill him, but that wouldn't stop him. He'd shut her in with a Dalek, after all.

The Doctor was a hero, the real, awful kind, with all the burdens that went with it. That was one of the mistakes she'd made with Mickey, that she'd never let her childish assumption that he was her hero grow up. Mickey was a good bloke, a normal bloke, a special and wonderful bloke. He was the kind of hero who would marry someone's trashy girlfriend just to make sure the accidental kid had a real parent in there some where. He wasn't Rose Tyler's hero, though, because she was too smart and too lucky to end up as the trashy girlfriend.

She was going to lose Mickey as a friend, Rose knew that. Oh, he'd say they were still friends, but they'd chosen such completely different paths in life that they'd have very little choice in the matter. He wanted her to stay safe and normal and ordinary, and there was nothing wrong with that. That was why the human race managed to survive even the planet that spawned it, because ordinary blokes and ordinary girls got together and had ordinary lives with ordinary kids, forever.

The difference was that there were millions of ordinary people, but not one of them could be her. Rose couldn't think of herself as particularly special. Rather, it was simply that what she wanted was different. Many, many people wanted to do better in life or be successful or be famous. Rose wanted to be the Doctor's friend. She wanted to be the girl who refused to take him too seriously, the one who knew that for all he was amazing and brilliant and powerful, you could still catch him eating chocolate ice cream out of the carton at three o'clock in the morning. She wanted to know that the demi-god who towered above whole armies secretly liked to watch Disney movies - in pajamas and mismatched socks - and could be moved to tears by them. She wanted to hold the hidden truth that the thing that fascinated him most, above all the wonders and glories the Universe could show to someone like him, was people, living life.

She didn't require all the knowledge and power and privilege that traveling with him entailed. It also had more than its fair share of dank, smelly dungeons, after all. She wanted the shower-singing, people-watching, sleep-bewildered, cat-cuddling, star-gazing, chip-stealing, appliance-destroying, absent-minded, manic-grinning, bloody brilliant lunatic who happened to be the Doctor.

So she would be his friend, because he needed a friend, a real one, more than anything else in the Universe. Someday, maybe, they would become more, though she would never expect it, because she simply didn't know if he even did that sort of thing. He didn't believe in "doing domestic", for all that Rose suspected he rather envied it in others, and you didn't get much more domestic than the complications of romantic relationships. That her love for him had grown far beyond friendship would be her secret, her cross to bear. She would have to be satisfied with it.

There was a sound just like the rest of the opening doors, far down the corridor behind her. Rose quieted, tensed, and waited.

*?*

Jack did the only thing he really could do in this instance - he took over and ran the ship like a tyrant. "Full sail! Every inch of canvas we've got! Ten minutes, gentlemen, we're wasting valuable time, here. Move!"

This ship wasn't going to move without the wind, being a sloop-of-war and not rigged for rowing. However, between the reluctant crew and the unreliable wind, they were taking far too long to get moving. He wanted to reach the most recently crashed vessel as soon as possible because it had been airborne until recently, which meant it could possibly be made airborne again by someone clever. While his plan to find the center of whatever was happening here was viable, it would be much easier to see from the air, much easier with sensors he could use to lock on to the source in the first place.

The ship could make about fifteen knots in the variable wind, maybe a little more if they were very lucky. Jack estimated their arrival at the new ship to be around two hours at that rate, and set a man with a sounding line in the fore so they'd know if there was a chance of shoaling. He had no way of knowing what was down there, after all, and he really wanted to get all of them out of this alive if at all possible.

Standing nervously next to the helmsman at the wheel (a very quiet old man who didn't particularly seem to care what was going on as long as he was allowed to steer the ship), Jack watched the water slip by them at a fairly decent clip. The sails billowed and rippled and made an awful lot of noise, unlike the booming full sails he'd always seen on ships in the old films. This was probably because of the wind issue, but he also supposed that since a sloop-of-war wasn't square-rigged, that might have something to do with it.

Every single order he gave had to be shouted, and then shouted again by the lieutenant, the midshipman, and about half-a-dozen other sailors down the line. It was fascinating, really, and if Jack wasn't worried about his new crew, the Doctor, and Rose, he would be enjoying himself immensely.

When the large green vessel crashed, it had apparently cut itself a path. Several abandoned-looking vessels of various types, from an unlikely looking canoe to something that surprisingly resembled an electronic raft, seemed to have been shouldered aside. Jack didn't want to think that some wooden vessels might have also been sunk, possibly manned, but he did set a look-out to keep an eye on the water just in case.

As they approached the green vessel at a distance, Jack ordered the men to furl sail so they could coast in the rest of the way by inertia. By the time they dropped the sea anchor (and hoped it found something to hang on to, as no one could even guess at the full depth) Jack could clearly make out a Synesthesian ship that was after his native time stream. That made things easier, as there should be boarding locks protected by forcefields on the top, shields that were impenetrable by energy or inanimate objects, but which could be easily penetrated by a clever ex-Time Agent with a decent blaster in his pack.

"I'm going to board her," Jack said, after watching the ship do nothing but bob in the water and blink her lights randomly for several very long minutes.

Smith and Taylor looked at each other and sighed. "Very well, sir," Taylor said, "then I'll collect a boarding party and join you."

"You don't have to..." Jack started.

"I think I do, sir," said Taylor, firmly, and that was the end of the discussion.

"I've never seen a ship like that," Smith said. Jack turned to tell him he wasn't likely to see one again, but was forced to silence. Smith wasn't looking at the Synesthesian ship at all. He was staring behind them at a large wooden vessel approaching them at speed, its oars cutting through the dark water and making it look like it was walking toward them on stilts.


	6. Ships Passing

The ship they were passing was almost unbelievably old. It looked more than anything like a crashed space-station or something similar, with sweeping spires rising tall and ungainly from the water. There were pock marks, patches pitted with rust and carbon scoring, and the Doctor thought he ought to recognize it.

He studied it carefully, since he was sure he had seen it before, and as a result, he noticed that the wrecks seemed to be all around the thing, thickest closest to it. The crashed space station was the center of the disturbance, obviously. His eyes scanned the hull until he found what looked distinctly like an air-lock that could be breached. "S'my stop, lads," he said.

The Vikings who were rowing the boat and already too annoyed with him to tolerate much more glared. "What will you do with us?" demanded Rocks-for-Brains, who was steering the dragon boat.

"Whatever you like," the Doctor said. "I should have this sorted shortly. Ya can head off ta the ship we saw earlier, or ya can wait here, or you can head back the way you came."

"You have said many things that make no sense, Thunder God," accused Rocks-for-Brains. "But nothing that we have understood. Must the Aesir be so confusing?"

"Yes?" the Doctor guessed. "Maybe you'll understand when you reach Valhalla." He shrugged. "For now, you're just gonna hafta live with a few mysteries. It'll do ya good." He waited until the boat had halted and waited until its rocking was gentle enough for him to make a vaulting jump to the prow of a small boat just off the bow.

His landing was still twisted and uncomfortable, but the Doctor forced himself to ignore the sudden, shooting pain in his leg. "Wait!" shouted one of the Vikings, a beardless youth with bright, ecstatic eyes. The Doctor turned back. "Let me come with you."

The Doctor studied the boy. He was strong, primitive, and carried a sword that probably outweighed Rose. For some unfathomable reason, the Doctor was suddenly reminded of Jamie - and Leela. "On your own head," was all he could find it in him to say.

*?*

"Why is it always Vikings today?" Rose wondered aloud as she tore down the corridors of the strange, abandoned ship. At least a dozen burly Vikings were following her, armed to the teeth, and shouting that she was pretty and they wouldn't hurt her.

Yeah, right. She didn't even buy that from blokes offering her drinks in pubs, she certainly wasn't taking it from a ravening pack of slavering, bearded bastards who smelled like wet iron and stray dogs. And how had they gotten here, anyway?

Hell, she didn't know how she'd gotten here, really, but it had been so nice and peaceful... and she had hated every moment of the quiet. But now that the stray Vikings were chasing her, she really wanted the quiet back.

She ran full out up the corridors, ducking through doors as they opened and wishing for her own sonic screwdriver. Or just the Doctor. Yes, just the Doctor, that would be ideal. He wouldn't let the Vikings get her. He'd pull her through one of these doors and manage to lock it behind them, probably waving a cheery good-bye at the Vikings like he had at Downing Street when he dropped the metal barrier that shut them into the Cabinet Room.

Well, if she couldn't have the Doctor - er, have the Doctor with her, that was - she'd just have to be clever on her own. She did a quick inspection of the door plate as she ran past it, then the next and the next, until she was sure she had the locking mechanism figured out. After darting through the fourth door, she smacked her hand down on the big red button and the door closed like the blade of a guillotine. Rose grinned in satisfaction and started to run again.

Only to be pulled up short by a tug at her hair. She shrieked first in fear, then in anger as she realized that it wasn't a Viking that had caught her, just that her hair had been caught in the door as it slammed closed. She tried to pull it free only to find herself yelping in pain.

She was trapped, couldn't move, imprisoned by her own hair and her own cleverness. Rose Tyler sighed, then looked down at the sword she still carried. Nothing else for it, really, just in case the Vikings could get through the door with a blunt axe or something. Just had to be careful not to end up like Van Gogh. Or Nearly Headless Nick.

*?*

Jack met with the crew of the dragon ship, since he hadn't known what else to do. Apparently, they'd seen the Doctor - the poor bastards - and been led around by the nose by him for awhile. However, he'd ditched them - and acquired one of their crew for a companion in his search - on board a nearby vessel.

It hadn't been easy to get this out of them, however, as there'd been a lot of bowing and scraping, quite a lot of mythological significance, and several threats and counter-threats to wade through. The Americans didn't trust the Vikings, the Vikings didn't trust the Americans and, technically, Jack didn't trust any of them. However, he had to make do with the situation as presented.

The Vikings had been swept down the coast of "The New Lands" during a late hurricane that had the misfortune of interrupting a very important clan war. They were chasing Argh and Ugh and someone else with a different impossible name, and their crew of miscreants. Their goal, apparently, was to sacrifice Argh - the leader of their rival group - to him.

Somewhere in all this, Jack had discovered that there was no convincing the Vikings he wasn't Odin. Being a con-man, a liar, and a skilled tactician, Jack had resigned himself to being the most convincing Odin possible. After all, if these Vikings were so convinced that the Doctor hadn't been able to escape deification (a fate he vehemently protested whenever it befell him), then there was no way Jack stood a chance.

He also learned that: "Thor's only focus is retrieving his Lady, Sif, from Loki."

Taylor, saving Jack the trouble of blowing his cover and looking stupid besides, demanded to know who this Sif was and why Loki might have taken her. Jack gestured the Viking who had been talking all this time, an older, bearded, stubborn looking man with a vast paunch and a barrel chest.

"The Lady Sif Golden-Hair is the Thunder God's bride."

_Good job, Doctor_ , Jack thought. _Stick me with the issues while you go rescue the girl._ He couldn't decide if that was out of character because it was the Doctor, or absolutely typical because it was Rose.

Jack was about to try to organize some sort of peaceful solution to all of this when the teleport effect took him.

*?*

"What's your name, lad?" the Doctor asked as he soniced open the iris door that led into the interior of the space station that was not in space. Mind, he hadn't yet decided if this was actually a planet or if it was something else. Circumstances, such as the fact that it was dark but not lightless, and sunless but not frozen over, seemed to suggest that the place was decidedly in the "something else" category.

"Erik," the boy replied in a quiet, respectful tone that would probably come in handy for this excursion. He was unlikely to wander off, anyway. That was a plus. Rose tended to wander off all the time, and half the time she brought back poorly house-broken pets when she did.

He would say he'd drawn the line at the Dalek, but the idiot genius probably had even the Dalek beat. At least Jack was useful. He wondered what she'd say when he turned up with a random new human this time, and grinned for absolutely no reason whatsoever (none, really). "Nice ta meet you, Erik. Call me Doctor."

"I couldn't possibly," said Erik, as they stepped through the doorway and into an abandoned corridor. "For a mortal man to address the gods familiarly must surely be death."

"Well, suit yourself, but I usually go by Doctor." He shoved at the section of the iris door that didn't open, and it finally slid out of the way just as the Doctor realized that the twinge in his ankle wasn't going away.

Limping into the access port of the space station and triggering the over-ride on the airlock, the Doctor wondered how he'd managed to piss off Sod's Law so badly this time. He had never - not once, not ever - managed to twist, turn, break, damage, strain, pull, or sprain an ankle before in any incarnation. He'd considered it a failing of the decidedly companion kind, just the sort of thing they did to inconvenience themselves while running. He would have even believed it was impossible with Gallifreyan physiology, but his grand-daughter was the worst for it, ever.

A quick biological scan with the sonic revealed that he hadn't actually sprained it, which would probably have been easier, even if it would have made him feel quite ridiculous. All the running he did should have made it unlikely, if not impossible. No, he'd genuinely broken it, landed on it wrong and put a hairline crack into the bone.

Given the delicacy of the situation, the Doctor decided he'd sort it out when he got back to the TARDIS. For now, he just told his ankle that it didn't hurt and reinforced it with biochemicals. They would work for awhile and he could keep a wash of them in his system as long as Rose wasn't around. The side effects included giddiness, after all, and she probably wouldn't take too kindly to being tackle-hugged by a Time Lord high on internal amphetamines.

"Right, Erik, let's get a move on then, shall we?" He set up a brisk jog that probably wasn't good for his ankle, but it was good for getting back to Rose. (Might be fun to tackle-hug her. After all, she had squidgy bits that would feel fantastic under him, and the look on her face would be priceless.)

There were two sounds that reached his ears and brought his rather silly ruminations on priceless looks on Rose's face to a halt. To the left, somewhere, he heard the quiet sound of someone crying. To the right, he couldn't quite make out what the sound was, but it might very well have been some sort of music. He decided to head to the crying first. The owner of the tears, after all, sounded very young and very alone.


	7. If Wishes Were Horses

It had been a while since Jack had materialized in the middle of a blaster fight. He just didn't hang out in those sorts of bars anymore. Nevertheless, his reflexes had never dulled. "Down!" he shouted to the people who had materialized with him. He had his own blaster out of its hidden holster before the word was complete and was firing off stun rounds and reaching for his backup weapon before they actually got round to doing as they were told.

It was over surprisingly quickly, however, as one of the blaster wielders shouted, "Hold your fire!" about two seconds after Jack got a shot off that singed the guy's nose hairs without touching the man himself. Jack would have been proud of that shot, except that he'd been aiming at the guy's own firing hand. He'd be so glad when he got his eye back! The uniform had revealed the man to be the captain of the Synesthesian ship, and Jack had figured that the presence of his blaster (indicating a modern time period and potential ability to listen to reason) would calm the man or at least pique his curiosity.

"Identify yourself!" one of the others with the Synesthesian Captain ordered.

"You first," Jack called back. He had the more secure position at the moment, not that he couldn't lose it quickly or be swarmed under. All the same, it was better if he used his advantages while he had them.

"Oh for..." The Synesthesian captain swore loudly and colorfully and Jack chuckled. "Captain Torrin Starside," he added at the end.

"I'm called Captain Jack by most of the people here," Jack said, standing up. "At the moment, we come in peace." He held his blaster out, pointed at the air, his hands away from the trigger. He smiled his best smile, tried to look honest, and hoped.

It was moments like this when Jack could admit, at least to himself, his deep dark little secret. He wanted to sleep with the Doctor, sure. Wanted Rose, too, every day and twice when they ran for their lives. He'd even occasionally admit that he loved them both, was in love with both. But this part, Jack kept buried where even he couldn't find it most days.

Still, he stood to his full height, threw back his shoulders, and approached the Synesthesian captain as if it was perfectly ordinary to end up with 8th century Vikings and 19th century Americans on 55th century space ships that were sinking into inexplicable not-oceans in impossible places. Jack really, secretly, wanted to be the Doctor, and right at the moment was as good a time as any.

*?*

Erik insisted on going ahead of the Doctor into the deathly clutches of whatever small and crying child might be awaiting in the next room. The Time Lord, shaking his head in either annoyance or disbelief - he couldn't decide which - followed after the young Viking and wondered at the things that went on in humans' brains.

The boy they found was huddled in a corner of the room, shaking and sobbing for his mother. The Doctor felt his hearts clenching in his chest - children were always harder on him than anything else that happened. He knelt down next to the boy, mindful of the broken ankle, and trying to be convincingly nice. That didn't stop him glowering at Erik until the young Viking put his sword away and put on a friendly expression as well, or as friendly as an early adolescent from a warrior society could manage.

"What's your name?" the Doctor asked the little boy, who couldn't have been any more than six or seven years old.

"Stanley," the boy sniffled, perking up almost immediately upon seeing that he was no longer alone.

The Doctor decided that he liked the kid already. Brave little lad. "Nice to meet you, Stanley, and where are you from, then?"

The curious little boy looked at the Doctor as if he were stupid, which the Doctor found rather amusing, if inconvenient at the moment. "He asks because we're not where we're supposed to be," Erik said helpfully, saving the Doctor the trouble of wondering how he could explain. "You've noticed that the world around you is not right, have you not, Stanley?"

"Yeah," the lad agreed, and also gave his address, which was somewhere in Manhattan.

New York? How did New York come into this? "What was the date, Stanley?" the Doctor asked urgently. "The whole thing, please." The kid's clothes said early twentieth century, but you just couldn't be sure with children's wear. Until fashion became cheap and easy, kids' clothes changed much more slowly than adult styles.

Mind, if Rose knew he knew any of that, the Doctor imagined she'd probably never let him hear the end of it. Meanwhile, Stanley confirmed the date as 1929, which didn't help in any way. "Let's see. Great Depression begins. Several architects of the 20th century born. Color TV was first demonstrated in New York, that year. And the Academy Awards started. Nothing particularly explosive or destructive, really. Makes no sense at all."

Normally, his thought processes would have required him to work it out, or would have provided him with a plausible explanation. This time, slightly tipsy on bio-chemical painkillers, the Doctor couldn't be bothered. "It'll come to me. You're prob'ly s'posed to be here or something, some great big, paradox loop I'll have ta invent new words to explain later. Time's like that, sometimes, all out of order and wobbly." The Doctor shrugged. "I'll have to work on that one," he decided.

"Who are you, Mister?" Stanley asked, eyes wide and fascinated.

The Doctor gave the boy his very biggest grin. "I'm the Doctor," he said, at exactly the same time as Erik answered the way he knew. The Doctor rolled his eyes. "I'm the Doctor to lots of people, but to the Vikings, I'm Thor," he admitted.

"Like a secret identity? Like Zorro? Father reads to me about him."

The Doctor chuckled lightly. "Yep, exactly like Zorro. Can't let anyone know what I'm really about. Now, we need to get moving. Is it okay if Erik carries you?"

"Me?" Erik asked.

"Yeah, you. Big, strong, strapping Viking lad, Stanley here shouldn't weigh anything ta you."

"But my sword," Erik complained. "I shall need my hands free if I need it."

The Doctor sighed. Stanley couldn't possibly weigh more than thirty pounds, he decided. Definitely less than Erik's sword. "Go on, give 'im a leg up, then."

Next thing he knew, he was walking (with a broken ankle) through the corridors of a derelict space station with a twentieth century human on his back, an eighth century human at his side, and looking for a twenty-first century human, a Gallifreyan space ship, and a fifty-first century Time Agent. Some days, the Doctor really wished he were someone simpler. Like Jack.

*?*

" _There's a saying old says that love is blind, still we're often told 'Seek and ye shall find'. So I'm going to see a certain man I've had in mind..._ " Rose turned a corner, trying to remember if she had all the words right or not. It had been a long time since she'd heard this one.

She smiled and fingered her hair and hoped it wasn't as bad as it felt like it was. There was absolutely no way she was going to take this mess home to her mother to fix, so that meant making the Doctor take her somewhere with a professional who could fix it. That'd be like pulling teeth, but on the plus side, she'd have the threat of her mother as the only alternative. It was too funny.

" _I'm a little lamb who's lost in the wood. I know I could always be good..._ " That was too funny, too, really. She was no lamb - though she was hardly the big bad wolf - but the Doctor always seemed to see her that way: small and delicate and in desperate need of protection. The age of chivalry might be dead, but the Doctor would resurrect it to suit his convenience. Shame.

She found a corridor that looked a bit different from all the other corridors she'd been through, which struck her as dangerous, so she drew her sword just in case. Nobody was going to buy it as a credible threat, but it was the best she could do. " _Although he may not be the man some girls think of as handsome, to my heart he carries the key..._ "

The exact difference, which had taken her a moment to place, was the walls. They were sparkling and glittering and Rose started to worry that she'd made a major mistake coming down here. This gold stuff might be terribly dangerous, just like the stuff in front of the TARDIS when this part of the adventure started. She put the sword away so she wouldn't have to risk touching the walls even with the blade, even accidentally.

" _Won't you tell him please, put on some speed, follow my lead, oh how I need someone to watch over me..._ " Singing nervously and quietly, stepping carefully to avoid bumping the walls herself, Rose continued down the corridor. She watched the walls suspiciously until, abruptly, the hallway opened out into a wide, glittery, beautifully sparkling room.

There, in the very center of the floor, standing blue and proud in her own spot light, was the TARDIS.

Rose gasped and charged toward the ship, practically glowing herself in her happiness at seeing her. A thunderous voice cut through her delight and brought fear instead, and Rose's hand instinctively went to the key at her neck.

"STOP!" the voice repeated, and then something very, very heavy hit her hard in the back.


	8. The Trouble with Vikings

The Doctor frowned at the suddenly glowing walls of the Space Station and pulled out the sonic screwdriver to give them a more serious look over. He ignored the random piles of nonsense his brain was coming up with and concentrated on the readings from the sonic screwdriver. "Displacer wave," he muttered to himself. "Don't touch the walls, lads," he added just loud enough to be heard.

His brain really was rattling up there, though, but his ankle hurt entirely too much to do without the chemicals. It just wasn't happening. Time Timer Time Lord Tock... Complete gibberish.

He set up a brisk pace down the hallway, getting the distinct impression that he was expected somewhere sooner rather than later. The walls continued to sparkle and glow and the Doctor watched them suspiciously, but they didn't do anything but glow with a slight gold veneer.

The singing he'd been hearing had gotten louder and more distinguishable and all of the sudden, he realized that it was Rose's voice. How he could have missed that, he didn't know. A smile stole his lips as he realized what she was singing. Due to his mental state, he even allowed himself the lovely little delusion that she was singing about him - the words certainly applied to a big eared alien, didn't they?

Then, he heard it - or her, rather - crying out a warning that Rose couldn't hear. Panic flooded his veins. "Erik, take Stanley an' protect him. Somethin's wrong up ahead - don't come in 'til I call you."

The young Viking nodded gravely and lifted the little boy from the Doctor's back. "Be good for Erik, Stan, an' don't run off. I'll be right back."

Stanley nodded gravely and stood next to Erik. "Are you sure..." the young Viking began.

"Time ta rescue me lady fair," the Doctor said with a big grin. "I'll handle it.

Erik gave him a salute and the Doctor charged down the corridor, urgently calling for Rose and hoping almost desperately that she could hear him.

*?*

The Synesthesians, it turned out, had been here a very long time, as the anomaly crumbles. They'd arrived eleven months ago, for them, but it was before any of the other ships had arrived except the gigantic space station that they believed was the source and center of the whole situation.

"The problem, of course," said Captain Starside, "is that the thing is completely impenetrable. Well, that was the only problem."

"What happened?" asked Jack, helping himself to the flask one of the Vikings had dredged up in an attempt to make peace with the Americans. As near as he could tell, it was working. Sailors the universe over appreciated the value of a good hip flask.

"We were employed to be here; were paid to locate and track the Bermuda Triangle."

"That myth?" asked Taylor, chuckling.

"Not a myth at all as it turns out," said Starside's first mate, a burly Synesthesian called Greyhorse. "We're all inside it. Captain Jack knows about our nature, and I doubt you lads would understand."

"Tell 'em it's a gift from the gods," Jack suggested quietly.

Starside and Greyhorse grinned at him. "The gods," Starside said agreeably, "have decreed that we have special senses that most mortal men do not have. We see things you do not, including the energies of divine things tampering with mortal ones."

Jack nodded and winked, then turned to his dubious looking Lieutenant. "They're trained and born with the ability to see things you can't. Like Charlie over there." Jack gestured at the hand who had been pointed out to him earlier as the one who always knew what the weather would be like. "He has a sense of the weather that you don't have, right? There are others, and this is one of them."

Taylor reluctantly seemed to accept it. "But why are you now sinking if you've been here for months with no noticeable difficulty?"

"We've been picking up the crews as they arrived," replied Greyhorse, "and it's been everything, in reverse of course. Just this last two weeks, though, we started getting into some total primitives. These lads here, a couple of old style planes, and of course, the Vikings."

"Mostly, everyone's been very cooperative," Starside continued. "But not the Vikings. They escaped early on and have declared war on my crew and anyone else who gets in their way. They'd be bad enough but they managed to get blasters yesterday, Jack, and this morning, they sacked the Bridge."

"Are they with Argh and Ugh?" Jack asked. The oldest Viking with him corrected Jack on the names, but Jack couldn't be bothered to try to remember. It sounded like he was going to have to referee a war.

"Right," said Jack. "I think it's time I assert my authority. Besides, we need to retake the bridge."

"Yes we do," agreed Starside. "But what do you need it for?"

"I need to run some scans to find a time machine, a specific branch of alien tech, and a very, very rare alien."

Taylor stared at him. Jack shrugged, "I lost a strange friend, all right?"

"You're strange enough by yourself, Captain," Taylor told him with a smile. Jack decided Taylor ought to be smiling that smile in a decidedly compromising position - or an entire series of them - but shook himself and got back to the situation at hand.

"The point is, no one who is here belongs here," Jack said. "Well, that and my friend somehow managed to get aboard the derelict space station that you guys say is impenetrable. This is gonna require cleverness, resourcefulness and..." He turned and looked at the men who'd been brought on board with him. "Like everything else today, some Vikings."

*?*

"Hello," said the Doctor.

"Oof," said Rose.

The Time Lord chuckled. "Ya do, you know," he said softly.

Rose, having been knocked sprawling and tumbled across the floor, already had plenty of excuses for being breathless. That was before she'd realized how the tumble had landed them. Now, she knew she was going to wake up nights from dreaming about this.

The Doctor settled himself more comfortably and Rose found herself wondering if she was going to live through this experience at all. Her face was heating up, but it was the least of her worries as her body started to succumb to that warm, liquid flush spreading through her. "Doctor," she murmured.

He grinned down at her, his eyes sparkling like temptation. "Rose Tyler," he replied, his voice caressing her name sensually.

Rose decided she'd better do something before this became a serious problem. "Why'm I on the floor?"

"Long story," said the Doctor, smirking down at her, shifting one of his knees for no reason Rose could be entirely certain about.

She would have been fine with that, except that he was currently nestled quite firmly between her thighs. Every single movement he made pressed their bodies together in an extremely intimate way, a way that made her head swim and her blood heat to boiling. "Try to make it short," she squeaked out.

"Ya really do need someone to watch over you. If you'd've touched the TARDIS, there's no tellin' where you'd've landed. So I hadta stop you. Also, I'm a bit drunk. If I concentrate, I can still act normal, but there's entirely too much I'm having to concentrate on at the moment to even try acting normal. Also, well..."

"Also well, what?" asked Rose.

The Doctor bowed his head, looking a little embarrassed, then jerked it back up just as quickly. Rose couldn't help giving him her best grin there, she really couldn't. His ears and cheeks were tinged a lovely and delicate pink and she knew he'd ended up looking down her shirt. "I missed you," he blurted.

Rose's tongue touched the edge of her grin. "Missed you, too," she murmured and, feeling like she was going to get sent straight to hell, but still unable to resist, she wrapped one of her legs up around the Doctor's.

His grin went away, but it was replaced by a slow, comfortable smile, a real one. Such affection shone in his face that Rose almost melted. She had to fight with herself and fight hard not to start moving beneath him. She had the distinct feeling that she might enjoy herself for a few minutes, but when he had a panic attack and apologized, she'd regret it. After all, he said he was a bit drunk, which made it wrong, even if he did feel incredible and...

His head tilted to one side, his eyes focused completely on her mouth. Rose tipped her head back to match him, to let him know he could if he wanted. She wasn't going to resist his kiss. Even if later she had to pretend she didn't think anything of it, at least she'd have the kiss to remember.

"Danger approaches, Mighty Thor!" called a young but booming voice. It echoed through the room they were in and seemed to fill every inch of it.

"I really hate Vikings today," the Doctor said quietly. He kissed the tip of her nose, vaulted to his feet, and dragged her up after him, all in something that seemed an awful lot like only one gesture. "Get in here!" he ordered.

A pair of boys, one a teenager who appeared to be armed to the teeth, and the other a very little child, came running into the room. "Don't touch anything," the Doctor said. "Erik, get over here, what's happened?"

Rose pulled her sword out, ready to hand it to the Doctor in case he needed it. The older boy, apparently Erik, stared at her in absolute fascination, before shaking himself when the Doctor cleared his throat loudly. "Our enemy approaches," Erik said. "The clansmen who will not obey the words of our chief, who will not obey his law or the laws of the gods." He shook his head. "Doubtless, they have allied themselves with Loki as well."

The Doctor frowned, then flicked the screwdriver over the control panel, causing the door to spring closed. "No time for another horde of Vikings up in here, I've got to disarm all this and fast. We'll need to hold them off for a mo'." The Doctor flipped the sonic screw driver and tossed it to Rose. "Setting 1388, Rose, on that panel," he ordered. Rose nodded and took the sword with her as she hurried over to get the door locked or booby trapped or whatever it was the Doctor had her doing to it.

"Has Loki taken Moljinir?" the older boy questioned the Doctor.

Rose grinned to herself and wondered how he was going to get out of that one.

"What's Mewner?" asked the little boy in an accent that was American, but nothing like Jack's.

"His magic hammer," Rose said gently. The Doctor looked at her pleadingly and she decided to rescue him. He really must be messed up a bit if he didn't know what to do about a couple of curious little kids. "It's in disguise," she said. "And he can't turn it back or bad things will happen."

Then, she switched the setting on the screwdriver to the one the Doctor had given her, and pointed it at the door, which shut itself. The panel sparked, glowed brightly, and exploded, all in rapid succession.

While she was doing this, the smaller child seemed to decide she was the safer place to be and stayed at her side, while the older one migrated with the Doctor toward the door they had used. Rose was honestly surprised that there were only two doors in a room this size on this maze of a space ship.

"What happened to Lady Sif's hair?" the older boy - Erik, if she'd heard the Doctor correctly - asked the Doctor in what he clearly thought was a low voice.

The Doctor was behind her, fingering the mess she'd made of her hair before she'd even blinked twice. "Who did this?" he demanded, and he looked furious.

Rose sighed. "It's not what you think. I had to cut it to get away is all. It got caught." Sif. What a name.

"Loki stole her hair, didn't he?" Erik demanded.

"He's really got it in for Loki," Rose observed, _sotto voce_.

"Custom," the Doctor replied. Then, he shrugged. "Suits the legend, though," he added.

"Oh, good," Rose answered vaguely.

"Yeah, he did," said the Doctor loudly. "An' I'll take care of it, but first we gotta hold off your relatives. Stanley, you stay with Sif over there. Don't either of you touch anything but the floor."

Apparently, the Vikings decided they wanted through this door. Rose would bet it was the glow of the corridors - they thought it was magical or something. Unlike the room she'd shut them out of before, this one mattered to them desperately. She stood with little Stanley behind her, tense and worried as the Doctor and Erik guarded the doorway.


	9. Morality and Mortality

Storming the Bridge, while the only truly viable option, was too costly for Jack to be willing to go that route. "We need more manpower or at least more firepower," Jack insisted, while Starside tried to invent a battle plan out of thin air and fairy dust.

"If you Americans could take..."

Jack slammed his hands down into the middle of the diagram Greyhorse was laying out on the teleport stage. "This will not work!" he shouted. When he was sure he had everyone's attention, he added, quieter, "How'd you end up picking us up?"

Starside glared at Jack, who glared right back, unrelenting. Finally, the Synesthesian captain surrendered. "We had the teleport programmed to find and lock on to the crews of the ships when they arrived. We added a time delay to the program after we started getting primitives, in order to give us time to assess them, but we left it running. Once the Vikings overran the ship, we didn't have any time to turn it off and, when they took the bridge, well, obviously."

Jack nodded, then reminded himself what the Doctor would do. "Have you tried talking to them?" he asked, wondering if he was as mad as the Time Lord in question for coming up with this idea.

Starside rolled his eyes. "They didn't listen. Their language didn't travel well through the translator. I dunno what sort of tech you've got..."

"All are understood in the underworlds," one of the Vikings assured Starside, to which Jack nodded because it was fun. "Besides, those faithful of our peoples are all faithful to Odin."

This time, Jack grinned and tapped his eyepatch. "C'mon, let me talk to them. Worst that can happen is I'll get sacrificed to myself, which you gotta admit is an interesting epitaph."

"We should set scouts to spy on them, first," suggested Midshipman Smith. Jack, who'd been beginning to wonder if the boy was completely shell-shocked, was glad to hear from him.

"Odin can send the ravens," suggested the Viking leader.

Jack frowned. What ravens? He didn't have...

Digging through his pockets and feeling more like the Doctor every second, Jack pulled out two tiny hovering search cameras that he and the Doctor had disabled and captured about three planets back. "What do you think?" he asked the Synesthesian Captain.

Starside nodded and gestured Greyhorse to take them. A small buzz with a micro-probe, a few moments programming, and the tiny cameras were floating about Jack's eye level. "Hi, guys," he said to the cameras. "I'll be your controller today."

A small green light on each camera blinked. Jack grinned. "Good. Got the layout of the ship installed?" Another green light. "Fantastic!" Jack announced, knowing full well that his Doctor impersonation was really getting out of hand now. "Head to the bridge and transmit the signal back down here." A final green light, and then the little cameras were zipping off into the corridors.

"Those weren't ravens," said the Viking leader, rather sulkily Jack thought.

"They're in disguise," Jack proclaimed proudly. "Aren't they fantastic?"

*?*

"Why are these people chasing us?" asked Stanley in a quiet, sad little voice.

Somewhere in all this shuffling, the Doctor had managed to explain that Erik was a Viking the Doctor had picked up, and Stanley was a New Yorker from 1929 he'd found wandering the space station. He'd also confirmed that this was a space station, and that it didn't like him. This made no more sense to Rose than anything else he'd said in the last few minutes – and possibly a bit less, actually – but it did mean he was using the sonic screwdriver on it constantly, which made him unavailable for questions.

"Because they don't know any better," Rose answered. "They assume they're good and we're bad because that's what makes sense to them. It isn't true, but they assume it anyway."

Stanley looked perplexed and Rose realized that, considering his time period, she probably should have just said that the Vikings were bad people and had done with it. Shade of grey morality wasn't the sort of thing people her gran's age accepted easily, probably because they weren't taught that sometimes your side was just doing what they wanted, not what they should.

"But Thor's gonna make it better, right?" Stanley asked. "He's a hero. Like Zorro?"

Rose frowned. She could just confirm it, she supposed, but Stanley was a smart little boy and Rose didn't really feel the need to lie to him. She guessed if he ended up needing to be lied to or fixed or something, the Doctor could probably handle it. "He's a hero, yes, but you do know that things can go wrong even with heros, right? So it's our job, as his friends and the people who care about him, to make sure that we do everything we can to help and that, if things go wrong, we're there to take care of him until it gets better."

"Listen to Rose, Stan. She always takes fantastic care o' me. But sometimes I have to save her, and sometimes she an' I don't win."

"What?" asked Stanley, incredulous. "But the good guys always win!"

"No, s'true," Rose insisted. "Sometimes we don't. Sometimes we're too late to do more than help the good guys pick up the pieces, and sometimes all we can do is make sure the bad guys don't hurt anyone else." She smiled into the serious little face and shook her head. "Good thing he's a doctor in secret - he can save lives both ways, right?"

The Doctor turned away from the door and looked at her suspiciously. Rose smiled back at him, not sure what exactly he was suspicious about. The panel in front of him sparked and the Doctor flicked the sonic at it, swearing.

"Why does that keep happening?" Rose demanded.

"The stupid space station is tryin' to let the Vikings in," he said. "I need to get to the control room; I can't do anything with it down here."

Rose frowned, then nodded. "Maybe if we go out this door, and go right after you toggle it or whatever?"

"Good idea. Sorry, can't think straight at the mo, me; you'll have to do the thinking for now. Good thing it's not a problem for you."

"Right," said Rose, "who're you and what'll you take to keep the Doctor?"

"Oi!" he protested. "That wasn't nice." He turned and strode across the room to crowd her personal space just a bit more than usual. Plus, he decided for some reason to mix his usual arms crossed sexy glaring pose with a decidedly notDoctor-like pout. Rose couldn't tell which bits of her were going to melt first but it was a dead cert that something was gonna have to give and soon.

He'd claimed he was "a little drunk" but Rose had caught him limping occasionally, so she suspected it was some sort of painkiller causing the odd behavior. What she didn't know was what he'd done to himself. "Are you gonna be ok?" she asked gently, reaching up a hand to stroke his face.

The Doctor put his hand over hers, leaning into her touch. "'M fine," he said. "Just a bit pissed, really, but that's better'n pissed off, I s'pose."

"Children," Rose pointed out, tapping his nose in admonishment while he just looked baffled about why he wasn't being petted any more.

"Well, child," the Doctor said, gesturing at Stanley. "'Less you mean yourself? Erik isn't by his lights, an' I haven't been ever, an' I didn't think you were, but..."

Rose shook her head in wonder. "You are absolutely trashed." She grinned. "I'm never letting you live this down." Shaking her head again, she considered the door behind them. "Do you know where the control room is?"

"Well, no," he admitted. "I thought you might. You found the armory, didn't you?"

Rose shook her head, apologizing with her eyes. "No, it was like... an office or something. I couldn't figure it out at all, but it had more artillery than an American action film, that place."

"Office, covered in weapons?"

"Yeah."

"That sounds familiar," the Doctor said, shaking his head as if it was rattling with loose change or something. "I can't remember, but it's familiar. We'll head for there first; the control room can't be far, right? I just wish I remembered what this place was."

"You'll figure it out," Rose promised. She wanted to tell him more, but didn't get the chance.

The door that the Doctor had been tending sparked. The Time Lord cursed as he realized he was not near enough to it to stop it opening this time. "Reason I don't do this," he said. "Makes me forget things. Erik, get over here." He flicked the screwdriver at the door behind them instead, while Rose snatched up Stanley and tried to tell herself that they didn't look like they were posing for the universe's weirdest family portrait or something when Erik joined them. Passing the Doctor her sword, she waited.

Both doors opened and the gang of Vikings who'd been chasing Rose all over the space station tumbled through the one on the far side of the room, swords drawn and fury in their eyes. "What is this place?" one of them demanded.

"It's a cargo bay," the Doctor replied. "On a space station. What do you lot want?"

The Vikings all looked rather baffled for a moment, as if it hadn't occurred to them to actually "want" anything in particular in all this. "Surrender!" the tallest of the group ordered. "And return Garheim to us!"

"And the woman!" one of the others added.

The Doctor and Erik bumped into each other on their way to get in front of her. Rose rolled her eyes. "I'm fine, you Neanderthals," she whispered to their backs.

"You'll not have Lady Sif, not while I draw breath!" Erik proclaimed.

"Erik Alricson!" the one who'd been doing most of the talking exclaimed. "We are cousins, you and I, our fathers were brothers in battle and cousins by birth. Join us and you will be treated fairly, you know you will. I have no ill-will to you, son of my uncle, merely to your mother's father's rule."

"Unn Vogson, I will not join you. My mother's father is the leader our people chose, the leader the gods approve. We must follow him, and you would know that if you..."

"C'mon, Erik," the Doctor ordered, putting a hand on the boy's sword arm. "Let's get out of here." Erik glared at the Time Lord over his shoulder, so the Doctor added, "Protect Sif, yeah, and the little lad, we don't want him hurt, right?"

Erik nodded. "Don't touch the walls," he shot at his cousin. "They're magical."

Unn sent an axe flying at them, and it missed by less than half a foot, embedding itself in the decking. The Doctor hurled Rose's sword in their direction in apparent retaliation. The Vikings all ducked and the sword struck the wall and vanished. "Magic," he repeated Erik's words more firmly. "Don't try to follow us."

*?*

Direct confrontation would never have been his choice, but there just weren't any options. They'd rounded up every loose crewmember and bystander they could find who would believe them. They had a meticulously timed plan in place. It was the best they could do under the circumstance.

Jack nodded off signals to the men accompanying him, then clicked his fingers at the tiny cameras. They both flashed green lights. The Bridge doors opened, the cameras flew inside, and then Jack stepped in after them.

One of the little cameras exploded, just as the Vikings holding the Bridge rounded on Jack, swords and blasters drawn. Jack used the distraction exactly as planned, to get under cover and make sure he had a solid surface at his back. He took in his surroundings while the Vikings shouted and cursed one another and blamed everything on black magic and each other.

So that was what a blood-eagle looked like. At this stage in his career, Jack rarely saw things that made his gorge rise, that made him violently sick, but he was reasonably certain that particular method of punishment or human sacrifice or whatever they called it had a very good chance of doing just that.

Of course, it gave him an idea where to start this conversation as well. "I am Odin, the All-Father. You have called and I am answering. What do you want?"

The Vikings, rather than being properly awed, started laughing. Jack knew, then and there, that this wasn't going to be anywhere near as easy as he'd hoped. This group was the biggest tribe he'd seen so far today, including the first lot chasing Rose across the beach... had that only been this morning?

Then, they opened fire. Everything went very, very slow. Vikings were shooting, Vikings were shouting, Vikings were waving weapons around. The Bridge doors opened again, and the various teams they'd rounded up were piling through them, taking the improved positions that the camera spies had revealed.

People were dying. Jack was shooting off stun rounds faster than he ever had in his life and cursing his blinded eye and ruined aim. There were screams and the Bridge turned into a war zone, and Jack knew, suddenly and without any doubt, that he was going to die.


	10. Cliff Hanger

The Doctor was reasonably certain that, under normal circumstances, the realization that just hit him would have upset him rather terribly. It was probable that it would have distressed him into a tantrum and even possibly reduced him to a useless puddle of tears.

As it was, the circumstances were nothing like normal, not even for him. He was, therefore, mentally composing the second draft of a thank-you note to the utter genius who had designed Rose's jeans. He also appeared to be inventing epic poetry inside his head. Oh well, he'd had incarnations to do that. He could justify it under clause something or other of the whatchamacallit act of flibbertigibbet...

"What?" said Rose, walking backward and looking utterly baffled at him. Apparently, he'd said some of whatever that mess was aloud.

"Could you turn back around?" the Doctor asked. What was left of his self-preservation instinct kicked in and added, "Don't want you walkin' into anything, yeah?"

"Are you all right, though?" Rose asked, very seriously, her eyes wide, dark, and concerned.

"Yeah," he said, basking in the warmth and sincerity in her tone. "It's the Third Zone space station Eldest," he explained as they took a left at the end of the corridor. "They were always rather proud of the age of the thing, since it had to do it the hard way. Point is, allied powers have use of your tech in wars, right. Doesn't mean they know what they're doing with it. So this space station disappeared after the fall of Arcadia and no one's surprised and no one's got time to look for it, neither." The Doctor shook his head. "S'older than my TARDIS, this thing," he said reverently. "S'older than most everything that's left, really."

Rose reached back and took his hand, letting Erik and Stanley slip around her. "You sure you're ok?"

"Basically feelin' no pain, right now, Rose. Could tell ya I'm prob'ly responsible for this mess, too, an' I'd never flinch, but..."

"You'd claim you were responsible even if you'd never seen the thing before, though," Rose interrupted. "Getting you figured out, Doctor. Everything's your fault and if it isn't, its only 'cuz you can't find a way to blame yourself, yet, but you'll work on it and take blame there, too. You're gonna have to stop that, honestly." She frowned up at him, stubbornly decisive. "Even if that Slitheen had eaten my mum, it would have been her own fault, all right, 'cuz it isn't nice to rat out your own kid to the government an' she didn't think, just drew that attention on herself. You saved her, you and Mickey and Harriet. You coulda not, you know. So I don't wanna hear it, I don't. You aren't responsible for this unless you personally told the thing, 'Hey, I'd like some Vikings!'"

She shrugged and thumped him in the chest, just as the Doctor had decided he was definitely tearing up. "Just 'cuz you're a superior life form don't mean you get to take credit for everything, you know. Let us screw some stuff up on our own, yeah?"

The Doctor sniffed a little, but only just enough that Rose would let him write it off and it would be one of their secrets. "Yeah, all right," he said, as grudgingly as if it had been dragged out of him by wild horses.

Rose laughed and made him smile and the whole Universe was just a better place all around. "Fantastic," the Doctor proclaimed loudly and, just up the corridor, a door slid open.

*?*

Jack fought his way through the Viking melee, trying to get to the door and call a retreat. Too many of the Synesthesians had gone down, and the survivors were the sort of men who would fight their way through anything, whether it was wise or not, simply because they believed devoutly in duty and dying for their cause, whatever it might be.

He saw quite clearly when Starside went down, knew the head trauma was fatal just from the spray of blood that followed the sickening crunch. He saw Taylor leap to the Synesthesian captain's defense, and dove back into the fray after the young lieutenant.

A stolen sword in one hand, an overworked blaster in the other, Jack tore toward the Viking at the center of all of this. That same Viking seemed to spot Jack all at once and lumbered toward him, belllowing, "I will conquer the man who would be Odin and then all will know that Argin Vogson should be leader of our tribe!"

So this was the famous Argh. Jack threw his blaster toward Taylor, who leapt and caught it. He needed it more, Jack was sure of that, being that everyone who wasn't Argin Vogson was headed toward Taylor, not Jack. The young American had apparently learned how to use the thing somewhere in all of this. He was firing off stun rounds almost as quickly and certainly more accurately than Jack could do, in a matter of seconds.

Jack decided Taylor had things well in hand, so he headed toward the lead Viking again, frantically searching the scene for something to use as a was a shield on one of the nearby bodies, and Jack grabbed for that with his now free hand.

It was firmly attached. Argin was still bearing down on Jack like a battle cruiser at full warp, a blood-stained axe wielded high above his head. Thankfully, his war cry was loud enough to warn people in the next star system, never mind anyone on the bridge right now.

Jack spun just in time. He raised his heavy blade as the axe came down, hoping that he'd at least get a chance to wound the enormous behemoth who was definitely going to kill him. His other hand, the one that had been reaching for the shield, now desperately frisked the body for a dagger.

The axe blade fell, iron blade to folded steel. With an enormous screeching sound, Jack's blade shattered.

Yes, definitely going to die.

*?*

The Doctor looked quite reluctant as he peered through the new opened door. "This is it," he said grimly. "The master control room. I used to meet their commanders here, tryin' to work out how... Never mind. Point is, I need ta go in there an' stop this thing."

Rose, determined to protect the Doctor from his horrible memories and whatever else was going on in his head, insisted on following him. "You kids stay right here," she ordered Erik and Stanley. "Keep an eye out for Vikings. And Erik, if you see any, call the Doctor. Don't try to fight 'em, even if it's one or two. Stanley's got to be protected."

"As my lady commands," Erik answered, and took a post by the door, the little boy clutching rather convulsively at his booted leg.

The door slid shut behind the Doctor and Rose, and they walked hand in hand toward a large, six-sided pedestal console in the center of the room. "Looks a lot like the TARDIS," Rose whispered.

"Tech sharing," the Doctor replied. "We had to do everything we could to protect our allies, even if it meant givin' 'em tech we never wanted 'em ta have. We weren't bein' frivolous, understand. Gallifrey wasn't self-sufficient, hadn't been for eons."

Rose grinned as a thought on that subject came to her. "Yeah, trying to imagine someone who calls himself a 'Time Lord' out driving a tractor."

The Doctor chuckled. "How's that working out for you?" he asked playfully.

"It isn't," Rose answered, just as playfully. Then, she sobered. "Doctor, why did that door open for you?"

"Probably keyed to my voice pattern." He frowned and shook his head. "Not exactly voice pattern. There's a thing... It's complicated. Sometimes when I say somethin' that you don't have a word for, it translates funny... Should I have told you that?" He shrugged down at Rose, his blue eyes troubled.

Rose shrugged back at him. "Just as well," she said, "since you're not making any sense, anyway." He might have been making slightly more sense than he meant to be, sure, but it wasn't anywhere near enough for Rose to get to the bottom of what he was saying.

"Good then," the Doctor said. "Just say my voice told it ta look an' see if I'm me, right?"

"OK," Rose agreed. "And once it decided you were you, it's gonna give you control of the space station?"

The Doctor gave her his very best broad, lunatic grin. "Doubt it! I'll prob'ly havta fight it for it."

"Sounds like fun."

Rose feigned enthusiasm so convincingly that the Doctor enfolded her in a warm, excited hug. "Tha's my Rose!" he exclaimed boisterously. Letting her go - and spinning her a bit as he did so - he bounded over to the console. His long legs made it look rather elegant as well as quick and child-like.

Rose's heart clenched in her chest as she watched him, but she was very used to the feeling. She'd gotten to cherish that little pain, actually, knew it as well as an old friend.

When she noticed the flashing amber colored light, she hoped it hadn't been going on all along and she'd missed it. "Doctor!" she exclaimed. "There's this light, here!" She leaned on the console near it, peering intently at the controls around it as if studying it would force it to make sense to her.

The Doctor came up beside her, peering at the console and blinking curiously. Rose had the sudden thought that she ought to get him some reading glasses so he could look more clever when he did that. "What's this then?" he mused softly. "Amber alert..."

He touched a control. He probably should not have done that. There was a soft static crackle. Something rose up out of the console before them, shifted about, and then pointed right at them.

Before they had time to duck, there was a blindingly brilliant beam of light heading right toward them.


	11. Answers and Alarms

Jack held his arm up above his face, clutching the fragment of his sword tightly in his fist. His other hand grasped frantically at nothing. Time seemed to trickle like honey through a soil sieve. Taylor was shouting in slow motion, Vikings were cheering in a distant, muted grumble, dying people were dying loudly but with a grotesque delay.

Jack would have said that his life passed before his eyes, but it didn't have the time. The heavy, vicious axe was coming down for another blow, this time a fatal one. The remains of his shattered sword were pointed high to try to defend himself. The sound of his blood pounding in his ears was the only noise Jack was certain he could hear.

He thought of the Doctor, he thought of Rose, he thought of having a home for the first time in as long as he could remember. He thought about running hand in hand.

His free hand convulsed once, twice. The blade whistled through the air. Jack's free hand closed around something hard and heavy.

There wasn't time for finesse. There wasn't even time to figure out what had just happened. Several strange shouts pierced the silence. Jack's hand, and whatever was in it, came up between him and the Viking about to kill him.

The spontaneous sword slid through the Viking's plate and leather armor like a needle through a bubble. The Viking staggered, his falling axe faltering.

Jack didn't question, just shoved the sword upward, hearing and feeling a sickening, tearing crunch. The axe slipped from Argin's fingers, clattered down toward Jack's fallen body. He shoved forward, pushing the dying Viking out of the way and, incidentally, off his sword.

The axe hit the deck right behind Jack's head with a clatter that sounded like thunder in the sudden, strange silence of the room. Jack blinked at the much smaller groups around him, almost expecting to find everyone dead.

The Vikings who remained standing had stopped fighting. The Americans and Jack's own set of Vikings were also staring at him. Even Greyhorse and the remnants of Starside's crew were gaping at him. Jack looked hard for the leader of his Vikings, only to find the old man dead near the Captain's chair.

He glowered through his single eye, more angry than he could remember being since the day he walked away from home. "This ends," he ordered. "Now."

Everyone else in the room threw down their weapons.

*?*

The beam of light ended just beyond the tip of Rose's nose and a man appeared. He reminded Rose a bit of Ian McKellan, older and distinguished but with a sort of dangerous bearing to him all the same. His clothes seemed almost exactly like Rose would have thought futuristic clothes would be - dark and shiny and freely flowing. His eyes, Rose was shocked to see, glowed even more brightly than the rest of him. He mostly appeared to be a television program or something, but his eyes were a sort of yellow that seemed to glow in the dark.

"Rose Tyler, Jastyn Arner," the Doctor introduced, softly. "Ambassador to Gallifrey and the Seven Systems, recalled after the War got started."

The man's voice, when he spoke, sounded like Sir Ian, too, all ponderous and of great importance. The only difference, as near as Rose could tell, was that he had a very, very odd accent, almost Greek, she decided after a moment. "Doctor, if you are receiving this message, then you will know that all of our plans have gone awry. Arcadia will have fallen by now. I do not know how you will survive. I do not believe you can survive." The tall man seemed slightly disturbed by this, but Rose wasn't sure if that was her opinion or not. She decided not to say anything, just clung tighter to the Doctor's hand, wrapping herself around his arm and hoping to give him some comfort by her presence.

The strange projection continued. "If the protocols you instated have failed, if all has failed, if there is any chance of Dalek incursion into this base, we have programmed a failsafe. We are not certain of the full extent of its capabilities, but our scientists hypothesize that our measures will take Eldest out of Time. Certainly, it will hold or destroy any time traveler who comes here. You will know all the details far better than I, Doctor."

Rose glanced up at the Doctor to find him white faced and shaking hard, his eyes wide and more than a little wild. His hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists, his whole body was rigid against her arm. Rose held on tighter, not knowing what else to do.

"If by some chance the war was won, there may be ways to restart our systems and withdraw the fail-safes. None of us, not even our finest scientific minds, know what they are. The assistance you have given us has been our only salvation during this conflict. Therefore, I have left this message to do what I can. Doctor, if you have come here after the end, I have only one piece of advice for you. Run."

Very serious, intense eyes focused strictly on the Doctor for just a moment. Then, the projection faded and winked out of existence. Rose held the Doctor's arm, waited to see what would happen, the leather cool and nearly clammy under her fierce grip.

"Ya know what I said earlier?" the Doctor asked. "'Bout feelin' no pain?"

"Yeah," Rose agreed, tentatively.

"Got that bit wrong," he whispered.

Rose shifted her grip so that she could offer him open arms without letting go.

*?*

"Right, let's get started." Jack leaned his sword against the Captain's chair which he now occupied, to the protest of none. "It looks like we've got enough power to fire the auxiliary engines and get us out of the water, or enough power to get the scanners back on-line. Since this boat is water-tight, I vote the scanners."

Greyhorse, commanding a group of Vikings who were collecting the bodies together, turned to Jack with confusion etched on his face. "We won't have power to get out of the water later, if we do that. Besides, what good will the scanners do us, stuck in a place that defies all the laws of physics?"

"If we can get the scanners back on-line, I know what to look for to find the source of the anomaly. The teleport's still working, so all we need is a way to trace that..."

"But the Captain looked for it for months," Greyhorse protested vehemently. "We couldn't narrow it down and we certainly couldn't teleport into there. Obviously, you know a few tricks none of us understand, but..."

"Thor," Jack said, firmly. "The scanner will be able to isolate my friend - just trust me. We go to him and I promise you, he'll be right in the middle of this."

"I've a question," said one of the Vikings, wholly deferential now that they'd decided Jack was their god.

"Feel free to ask," Jack allowed. He couldn't tell if this was one of the Vikings from the dragon boat or one of the Vikings from this ship. They were apparently members of the same tribe, at war, and now reunited at the death of the two leaders.

"We've seen you, and some of us have seen Thor. Will we see the Valkyries? Will they even be able to find the souls of our kinsmen, or are they lost to the wilds of this mad place?"

Jack frowned. The after life wasn't his specialty. Some of the Time Agents had believed in one, just as some had believed in the Watch, or various gods. Jack wasn't sure what he believed, mostly. He rather thought that these Vikings had a few right ideas, though, that the best death was one that was worth it. Then, if there was an Afterlife, you'd probably earned the good bits, and if there wasn't one, you'd done what was right for you.

Still, it mattered to these people, at least to the Vikings and maybe to the Americans, and possibly even to the Synesthesians. "The only people who see a psychopomp, like the Valkyries, are already bent to go with them," Jack said. He stood, so that he could speak with his full power, so that he could look as impressive as possible. "I promise you, all of our dead today have earned their places."

"And the rites?" asked another Viking.

"The Chief's dragon ship remains here, with the Americans' ship. We'll use it. I believe cremation on water is customary, and there can be no better honor than to be burned in the places you died for." Jack frowned and dropped back into the Captain's chair. "Greyhorse, can you get me the numbers?"

"As you wish, Captain," the Synesthesian first mate said. "And I think it's a better fate for my captain than a one way trip to Davey Jones' Locker."

"Nice to know some things don't change," said Taylor, and followed Greyhorse to the console to watch and help if needed.

"Legends are forever," Jack said knowledgeably.

*?*

"Right, so first we take down the forcefields," the Doctor said. "Then, we get zapped by the computer, ow." He stuck his fingers into his mouth.

Rose told herself she didn't even notice that. She had the bland expression down pat, even. "Why the forcefields? Why not the weird stuff on the walls?"

"'Cuz it's gonna take temporal mechanics to unravel that lot, and I need access to the TARDIS." He bounded over to another bank of controls, stopped in front of it, and plucked up a small and in-the-way Stanley. "Here," he said, passing the boy to Eric. "You two stay over there, next to the door."

Eric twitched nervously for probably the thousandth time since the Doctor had called the kids inside and locked them all in. Eric obviously didn't like the technology. Rose saw him reach for his sword every single time anything beeped or squeaked or started whirring. Gently, she began, "There's nothing here can hurt me or the Doctor. Why don't you just try to ignore all of it? The Doctor'll have something that makes more sense for you in just a minute, I'm sure."

"Less than that, actually," the Doctor said, as a bank of controls erupted with alarms and jangling whistles.

"Look after Stanley," Rose ordered and darted over. "What should I do?"

The Doctor looked at the controls and grinned and Rose remembered that he was drugged and loopy. "Press the red buttons," he ordered.

Rose considered this carefully before she did what he said. Thankfully, the red buttons didn't do anything catastrophic, just shut off and reroutes the various alarms. "What does it mean?"

"Something's got a lock on the station," the Doctor said, toggling various switches and pulling open every other panel under the console. "The really loud one is a temporal incursion - assumin' that's us. The deep, constant one is a teleport lock. That kinda pretty one is a 'what the hell is going on' alarm, and the one that's makin' all the lights go off an' all is a 'nothing makes sense' alarm." As he talked, he took the screwdriver to various computer banks, monitors, light fixtures, and even the occasional bit of blank wall. Pretty soon, the computer room looked like the Console Room on the TARDIS, wiring and cabling strewn everywhere, parts scattered to the four winds.

The alarms finally cut out, only to erupt again seconds later in order to punctuate a high pitched whirring that reminded Rose of teleporting on Star Trek. The Doctor sighed in exasperation and turned off the alarms again. He was quicker this time from practice. "Let's go say hi," he suggested.

Rose wished she still had her sword. Eric passed Stanley to her and insisted on joining the Doctor between her and the door. The Doctor tapped the door panel open, and they suddenly had a face full of guns.


	12. Reunited

The Doctor stared at the rather over-sized collection of blasters and rolled his eyes. "Jack," he admonished.

"Yeah, Doc?"

"Guns," he pointed out. Knowing the Time Agent, it was entirely possible that the man hadn't noticed.

"Sorry, Doc," Jack said, and barked a sharp command at his motley horde. The guns all lowered at once.

There was a bit of bowing and scraping as the Vikings with Jack - who apparently didn't need convincing about anyone's rank, anymore - made obeisance to the Doctor and Rose. Then, there was Erik.

"You are chief, now, Erik Alricson," said the oldest of the Vikings with Jack. As he spoke, the Doctor vaguely realized that some of these Vikings were the ones from the dragon boat. The old Viking chief wasn't here, and the addled mess in the Doctor's skull took a few moments to sort out that the old man must have been the former chief, Erik's grandfather, and killed in some confused confrontation along the way.

"My grandfather?" Erik asked.

"Burned with honors, and his fallen warriors with him," Jack said. "He fought bravely to the last."

The Doctor knew that Erik's culture had the unusual idea of the fate of the deceased, but he also knew that blood feuds (such as Erik's culture was also prone to) couldn't start if people really were wholly honored to die. To give the boy a moment with his people, he gestured Erik out the door, and then regrouped with Rose and Jack. He couldn't be bothered with the Synesthesians or what looked like a pack of early Americans, so he left them with the Vikings as he shut the doors behind the Captain.

"Is this everyone?" he asked Jack.

"The sensors on the Synesthesian ship aren't worth a lot..."

"Say that three times fast," the Doctor suggested to Rose.

"Focus," she admonished.

The Doctor hung his head and took a few slow, deep breaths. This really was getting ridiculous, if he needed Rose to tell him to stay on topic. Of course, she could pretend to be flirting her brains out and drunk out of her skull and still stay on topic, so he really ought to admit she was better at this than he liked to let on. But she was Rose, and he couldn't go telling her that, or he might not shut up and... "Wait. Jack?"

Jack was looking at him closely, and the Doctor thought the lad might be just itching to run a medical scan on him. "Did you hit your head or something?"

"Or something," the Doctor agreed. "Sorry, it's a bit cluttered up there at the mo'. So you didn't have sensors worth a damn, used 'em to track down an' follow... what, me?"

"You displace time and you've got two hearts," Jack answered with a shrug. "You're pretty damn unique in most situations."

"But you think everyone who's out there is either here or..."

"I brought about half of 'em with me - the rest are on the Synesthesian ship with a handful of the crew. It's like all sorts over there, Doc. Didn't know what I'd find here." Jack sized Rose up now, and blinked. "Did you cut your hair?" he asked.

"Long story." Rose waved him off. "Although, your sword looks familiar," she added as if it was an afterthought.

Her hand went to her waist and the Doctor watched with complete fascination as she removed the belt she was wearing. It took her holding it up and passing it to Jack before the Doctor realized she was passing the scabbard on to go with the sword, and not anything... yeah, better stop now.

"Gimme a hand over at the console, Captain. We've got a small displacer field to get down, for a start."

Jack's one good green eye flashed brightly with excitement. "What's it displace?"

"Everything, mostly," the Doctor said, then pointed Jack to the controls. "Well, everything that touches it at the mo', but it's gettin' stronger, an' there's already a wreck of displacement fields and temporal shifts here ta start with. Gotta get access to the TARDIS, 'cuz I need a coupla instruments."

"Oh, like what?" Jack asked. He held out his wrist, showing the Doctor that he was again wearing the leather wrist strap that held that broken Vortex Manipulator he still carried every where.

"Trust me, that's not gonna help, not in the state it's in."

Jack actually pouted. "Aw, I wanted to..." He flinched, and looked down toward his feet, his head whipping every which way as if to try to find something.

The Doctor slapped a hand over his mouth to hide a grin at the flash of utter bewilderment on Jack's face. Rose had no such qualms, just laughed openly.

"Wha?" said Jack, then reached down under the edge of the console and pulled out the very small boy who had been hiding complete silently. "Oh, hello," he said brightly. "And where do you fit into all this?"

"This is Stanley," Rose introduced. "We're not real sure on the rest."

"Are you Zorro?" Stanley asked Jack in a piping, innocent voice.

"No," said Jack. "I'm... Well, most every body here calls me Odin, but if you want, you can call me Captain Jack."

"You got a secret identity too, Captain Jack?" asked Stanley, thoroughly impressed.

Jack beamed and lifted the child up higher so he could look the boy in the eye. "I've got several," the ex-Time Agent confessed. "All your better superheroes do."

"Now don't confuse him," Rose said. "He's got one secret identity, Stanley," she said. "The rest of them are titles and things people give him. And Jack's more an anti-hero, really."

"Hey!" Jack protested.

"Well, you are," Rose said. "Lot more Iron Man than Man of Steel in you."

"She's got a point, Captain. Even if you do look like a perfect comic book hero," the Doctor agreed.

"I suppose I should be glad she doesn't think I'm the Tin Man," Jack said with a sigh.

The Doctor clapped a hand on Jack's shoulder. "C'mon, help me with this, an' then you can take your Vikings an' sort out the rest of the lot."

Jack went white. "There's more?" he demanded.

"Yeah," said Rose, "that's what I thought, too."

*?*

"I need the morpho-concatenator, the triphasic temporal manipulator, and..."

"You're just making those names up," Rose complained. "And if you're not, you're trying too hard."

The Doctor looked down at her with an expression she was very familiar with - she was pretty sure it was a fond exasperation, but it might be exasperated fondness. It wasn't quite the same as the 'stupid ape' look that everyone else got; Rose thought he might be giving her the benefit of the doubt. "What d'ya want then?" he asked sarcastically. "The blue flashy thing with the blinky lights?"

"Much easier," she said.

"OK," the Doctor answered. "Bring me that, and the red swirly thing, and that box that whirrs, an' a mug of somethin' brown an' milky, if ya... ow." Rose had thumped him in the hip for that last, as high as she could reach while sitting down leaning against the wall. The Doctor grinned at her, then made a face. "Oh, an' I'll want all the cabling lying 'round loose, if ya can manage it?"

Rose passed the Doctor a dozing Stanley and levered herself to her feet. "I'm leaving him with you, just to be on the safe side," Rose said.

"Yeah, might be best," the Doctor agreed. "Jack's not reported back about the Vikings, but the forcefields are down now, so we need to move on this."

He curled the boy close, and looked around the room, probably for a safe place to put him. Rose ignored the banging, falling sensation in her chest. She didn't even want to know what that was about.

The Doctor flicked the sonic at the wall and a small, cot looking thing slid out of a panel, well out of the way of the general mayhem, but at a spot the Doctor would be almost guaranteed to be able to watch the child. Stanley fussed a little and blinked in confusion at both of them when the Doctor put him down, but beyond that, he just rubbed his eyes with tightly balled fists and curled up. The Doctor's leather jacket made a perfect, balled-up child size blanket. Rose smoothed the boy's hair until he closed his eyes again, and firmly told herself that the Doctor wasn't giving her any sort of look. She wasn't giving him one, either.

"They sometimes worked round the clock here, or rested in shifts. The cot solved the problem for 'em."

Rose nodded and firmly turned away from the sweet tableau of the Doctor straightening his jacket around the small boy's shoulder. Absolutely nothing was going on in her head. Really.

*?*

Jack's blended crew finally found and came face to face with the heavily armed Vikings in the bay that held the TARDIS. "Weapons away," he ordered blithely. "War's over, I win."

Just as he spoke, the golden forcefields around the bay collapsed, leaving nothing but the odd trace of sparkling smoke. Everyone looked at Jack quite warily, even his own people, and the Captain grinned. He was truly appreciating the rather charmed luck he was having with timing today. Not that it was luck. Somehow, Jack was certain it had everything to do with the Doctor.

As Jack was coming to realize was completely typical of this culture, the biggest Viking with the largest axe stepped forward and glared at him. "I am Unn Vogson, by conquest the leader of these people. Who are you to give orders to me?"

Jack squared his shoulders and gave the man his very best Doctor-esque glare. Remembering young Stanley, who'd been sleeping in Rose's lap when he'd left, Jack said, "I am called by many names. Here and now, these know me as Odin, the All-Father. Your brother and your uncle now dine at my tables. Do you wish to join them?"

Unn started to say something when someone else spoke up. "Wait."

It was the boy who had been keeping the Doctor company, the one who Jack's Vikings said was now chief. Unn glared at him, and the boy, Erik, glared back. "I am chief now," the teen proclaimed. "I was acknowledged successor when my father died. I have stood at Thor's right hand and now I stand so at Odin's. You cannot say that, Unn. I am a proven warrior and a servant of our gods. All you are is defiant. Your allies are dead or surrendered. Let us make an end to this."

There were several more barbs traded back and forth, a few threats shouted by Unn's people, an offer by Taylor to just shoot the lot of them and have done with it. Jack gave that one very serious consideration.

The bay doors opened and Rose came in, walking quickly and purposefully toward the TARDIS. Jack watched her carefully, glad to find her well out of range of the not-yet-combatants. A sudden, eerie silence fell over the Vikings, and Jack whipped his head around, just in time to see Unn start across the bay toward Rose, Erik racing after him with sword drawn.

"Touch Sif and die," Erik threatened.

Rose turned around at the name Sif and suddenly realized the Vikings were after her. Just in time, she ducked a swipe from Unn, probably meant to take her as hostage. She rolled away and Jack skidded through the sudden melee toward her.

The Americans were shouting with outrage that the Viking had gone for a woman, the Synesthesians that he'd gone for a non-combatant. Erik had sprouted an enormous sword, and Unn a flop-sweat to go with his battle axe and pallid complexion. Several other Vikings went for Unn.

"He's mine," Erik snapped, then rounded on his opponent. "I warned you. I gave you the chance."

"What the hell is going on?" Rose whispered from where she'd fetched up against the doors to the TARDIS.

Jack watched Unn and Erik circle each other. "Your Viking in shining armor has decided to defend your honor."

Rose opened her mouth to protest, tried to get to her feet to stop it. Jack held onto her tightly with a hand over her mouth. "Let me handle this," he ordered.

"But Erik..." Rose protested.

"The kid's tough," Jack said. "You just get into the TARDIS, get whatever the Doc sent you for and get the hell out of here. Whatever you do, don't let this guy get you."

"But Jack..."

"Don't but Jack, me, miss." He winked his one good eye at her. "I'm a higher ranking god than you."

Rose rolled her eyes. "Jack, I can't."

"You have to, Rose," Jack ordered. "I promise I'll do everything I can. But you've got to think about the Doctor right now. Let me think about the Vikings."

Slowly, and with a look of grim frustration, Rose finally nodded. She was just unlocking the TARDIS door when the first sound of clanging metal rang out over the bay.


	13. Fighting It Out

Rose tossed a rucksack at the Doctor from the doorway of the control room. He caught it absently, only getting smacked in the face a bit, because his reflexes were off due to the excess of biochemicals in his system. "What's your bloody hurry, then?" he demanded, clutching at his nose.

Rose was already beside him, checking him for a nosebleed. "I'm sorry, I forgot," she said gently, a handkerchief in her hand as she dabbed at his nose.

The Doctor frowned, knew he wasn't bleeding, but couldn't find it in him anywhere to stop her paying attention to him. He needed her care and concern - sometimes so much it scared him. "What's going on?" he demanded.

"Erik's fighting with that bloke with the battle axe," Rose said. "I was going back, but that's 'cuz I forgot..."

"We can go," the Doctor offered, "if you think..."

"No!" Rose protested. "No," she added, more quietly. "You're hurt and anyway, Jack's with him. Erik wouldn't've challenged the bloke if he didn't know what he was doing and Jack's sure to take care of him."

"True," the Doctor agreed. "Not usually so confident about that, but Jack's really come into his own on this one." With a few quick gestures, he started unloading the rucksack, limping more than he wanted to do as he placed different parts on different consoles. He decided not to tell her what he suspected, that Jack might want to stay with his new crew when they got them settled somewhere. It wasn't guaranteed, after all, and maybe Jack would have some other idea, but the Doctor'd left more than one friend behind this way.

The only thing he needed that Rose hadn't brought was a cup of tea, and the Doctor supposed he could live without it. He looked vaguely at the instruments she'd brought him, trying to remember which was needed where. Feeling exhausted, sick, and nearly defeated, the Doctor turned to Rose and beckoned her over from her vigil over Stanley.

"I need you ta help me with this. Just, can you memorize something?"

"Yeah, no problem," Rose said, getting up to stand next to him.

The Doctor leaned over one of the banks of controls. "Corridor, incursion, infinitive," he explained, pointing out various control switches as he went. "We'll start with managing this lot, then move on. And we've gotta do it backward."

Rose nodded. "So, infinitive, incursion, corridor?"

"Yep," the Doctor agreed and set to work on the temporal manipulation array.

"But hang on, I thought an infinitive was like a verb or something? S'what Mr. Sawyer used to tell me, I think."

"Very good," the Doctor agreed, shooting her a proud look before proceeding to wire the first control panel to the temporal manipulator. "Same sorta concept here. The infinitive is the basic form of the verb, like 'to be', yeah? The last thing that happened here was yanking this place out of real-time, away from the basic form of reality. The zone we're in at the mo' is outside of real-time, but it's not inside any trans-dimensional or vortex space. It's literally a glitch in time."

"How's that possible, though?" Rose asked.

"Technically, it's not," the Doctor said. "Mind, that's speaking strictly technically, which we shouldn't bother really, 'cuz invariably somethin' like this happens. An entire series of unfortunate circumstances and amazing coincidences had to occur at almost, but not quite, the same instant, mixed with a disaster of the type you only find when there's an on-going flux in the stabilization of real-time."

"So, basically, they got what that bloke Arner wanted?" Rose asked. "Took Eldest out of time?"

The Doctor handed her a set of cables. "Strip," he ordered.

"You wish," Rose replied, but pulled out the pocket knife the Doctor had gotten her on Switzer Seven.

"Gives me somethin' ta do on cold nights," the Doctor answered, then hurried back to his lecture before Rose figured out that she ought to hit him. "They got the Station out of time, yeah," the Doctor explained. "But whatever they did - an' it'd take me forever to unravel the whole bloody mess - also high-jacked the time corridor that led to the incursion. Only thing I can't understand at all is how the corridor ended up attached to Earth."

"How about that one in Van Statten's bunker - fell through time, you said? Ended up on Earth, fifty years before it could've possibly been there, right?"

"Rose Tyler, you are a genius," the Doctor decided grandly. "That doesn't explain Stanley, but it may explain the connection. If not, it explains the late sunbathing pepperpot, anyway." The Doctor's connections abruptly came together and suddenly the console erupted into brilliant, multi-colored light. The Doctor whooped with delight and hugged Rose, bussing her on top of the head and making her laugh.

"What exactly are we doing in here with all this?" Rose asked. "I get there are infinitives and the corridor and stuff, but..."

"We're splitting the infinitive, ya might say," the Doctor explained, limping around the console to pick up a dazed, sniffling, and suddenly awake Stanley. "We gotta reassert reality in order to dismantle that corridor. Acts like a hoover, that thing, an' it'll keep growin', 'til it sucks up the whole planet."

"Earth outside of real-space is bad, Doctor, but if we reassert reality, won't all these ships just sort of scatter out in the vacuum like so much space junk?"

The Doctor's eyes widened. "Good point," he said with a brisk, formal nod. "Go find Jack an' tell him he's got an hour to get everyone situated and get everything off this station he needs. Stanley, my lad, how are you at pushing buttons?"

"OK, I guess," Stanley offered shakily.

"Fantastic!" the Doctor pronounced.

Rose took off for the landing bay at a dead run.

*?*

It became apparent almost from the first ringing clash of steel on steel that Erik had distinct advantages over Unn in a sword fight.

For one, Erik was lighter. His armor, such as it was, was made of thin metal plates over boiled leather, strong enough to turn a glancing blow but certainly not powerful enough to keep that heavy battle axe off him. At first, this had seemed more than a mere disadvantage, but as the fight went on a lot longer than the time it took to brain someone with an axe, Erik's lack of weight in comparison to Unn's be-weaponed bulk became the obviously better bet.

For a second thing, Erik was much younger than his cousin. Tall and heavily muscled, the beardless boy would be perfectly capable of simply dodging out of the way of anything Unn could come up with. Eventually, the man's age and weight would put him down from lack of wind and heart failure, without his ever laying a blade on the boy.

Unfortunately, the culture that had created these men didn't allow for simply running until your opponent dropped dead of his own accord. Jack had known some people who simply could not abide being called cowards. Even if dodging was the more tactically sound option, they were incapable of choosing the wiser course if it would allow another person to judge them. He'd buried most of them.

However, this was where Erik's greatest advantage lay. The boy was fearless, which was technically bad, but he'd apparently had far better training to back up his idealism. Moreover, Unn seemed to know it.

Real sword fighting in real life was never anything like it was in the films, not in Rose's time, not any time before or since. Jack had never quite understood it, truly, but he supposed it had something to do with the difference between looking like you wanted to kill the other guy and knowing for a fact that he fully intended to kill you.

Steel thundered and clashed together, punctuated by regular, dull iron clangs. Unn was using the battle-axe as a buckler and an offensive weapon, whereas Erik only had a heavy, iron-plated leather and wood shield. Unn battered at it repeatedly in the first few minutes of the fight, but Erik's strength and footwork held him safe under the onslaught.

After that it was almost laughable, would have been really, if a man didn't stand to lose his life. Erik peeled Unn's armor off of him, one piece at a time, and he almost made it look leisurely while he was doing it. What struck Jack the most, though, was that the kid never once gave any indication that he knew he was going to win. He didn't taunt, but he didn't move to finish it, either.

Back and back, deeper into the bay the pair circled and stepped. Jack noticed that Erik didn't seem to be holding his shield right, but he also noticed that Unn's grip on the battle axe was slipping. If he had to guess, Jack would assume the boy's arm had been damaged by the fierce rain of blows that had started this battle.

It happened too quickly for Jack's one eye to follow. One moment, Erik was completely in control, and when the Captain blinked, the boy had somehow dropped his shield. Jack's heart was in his throat, his hand on his sword.

Unn suddenly seemed to come back to life as Erik toppled sideways under a particularly fierce blow of the sword. He dropped his own sword, raising the battle axe with two hands. "I dedicate this death to Odin!" Unn declared.

"Good idea," said Erik. His sword described a vast, one-handed arch, and it was all over. Unn's arm parted company from his body, and his head joined it a split second later.

There was a phenomenal victory cry from the Vikings who had started this contest on Erik's side. Those who had not were dropping their weapons at his feet.

All except one of them. Jack didn't even see who he was or where he'd come from. He'd just been standing in the line, and then he was racing at Erik with a dagger raised high.

There was a familiar, high pitched shout of Erik's name from the doorway of the bay. The boy had just enough time to turn toward Rose, seeing his assassin a split second before the man fell on him.

Rose was sobbing and Jack was swearing, trying to get to his blaster. Taylor had jumped between the other members of his crew and the fight. Greyhorse had a blaster out but couldn't seem to get a clear shot. The Vikings were attacking the ones with the assassin. It was a completely incomprehensible scramble, and then the sound of a single pistol shot rang out above all the other noises.

Smith lowered the weapon as the assassin's body, now with an extra hole, slid off of the young Viking chief. A single curl of smoke wafted, pale and undisturbed through the suddenly born silence.

Erik raised himself to his full height, almost as tall as Jack, and threw back his shoulders, tall and proud. He held up his hand, and Jack could see quite clearly that he was missing the end of his ring finger. He'd actually grabbed the dagger with his bare hands. "I am Erik Odinswarder," the boy proclaimed, changing his name in the Viking tradition in honor of a great battle. "I am your chief by right, by blood, and by victory. Do any here dispute that?"

No one said a word. Jack grinned, then turned to see to Rose.

She was shaking but grinning. "Maybe the Doctor can fix him?" she asked.

"Seems like he's proud of it," Jack said, looking back over his shoulder at Smith and Erik becoming friends for life. "Didn't know they even had those still," Jack apologized as he realized Rose's eyes had fallen to the bodies. "Taylor!"

The American came over and Jack borrowed his blaster. "Thanks," he said, smacking the startled young man on the ass. He turned, sighted along his arm and, with the blaster set on disintegrate, took care of the bodies. Then, he returned the blaster, and another pat on Taylor's very nice bottom.

Rose rolled her eyes. "Sorry about him," she said to Taylor, "we try to keep him on a short leash, but he gets loose some times."

"I don't mind," Taylor said, very, very softly.

Rose grinned. "You're doomed," she said happily. "Look, Jack, now that you've scared them even more, the Doctor said to tell you we've got less that an hour."

"An hour?" asked Taylor.

"Before this whole thing comes unglued," Rose explained.

"Only an hour?" asked Greyhorse, his face tight with concern. "We need to find supplies, something to power the ship with, a way to restock the stores so that we can feed all these extra people... I just don't think we can..."

Jack held up a hand. "Never works that way. The Doc says we got an hour, we can do what we need in that time. This space station's abandoned, everything in this bay, except the blue box over there, the TARDIS, is salvage. We'll just take the lot."

Greyhorse looked panicked. "Do you know how to operate the equipment here?" he demanded. "I've never seen anything like it, it's not in any..."

"We'll do it the hard way, then," interrupted Taylor. "Get ahold of yourself, man. Your people are looking to you, now!"

"All we need to do," Jack explained, "is move everything to that teleport stage there. I'll go up and see if I can organize some pulleys and winches. Not this kind of wench," he added flippantly, pointing at Rose.

"So gonna get you for that," Rose said.

"I'm looking forward to it," Jack told her with his best handsome-hero grin. She was completely immune, of course. There was only one grin that made Rose Tyler melt, and Jack didn't happen to own it. "Greyhorse, take a team and teleport back to your ship - make room for the equipment in your holds. You can do that, can't you?"

"I'll send them," he said. "I need to stay here and make sure we don't pick up anything we can't handle."

Jack nodded. "Good idea."

"Right, I'll get the men started moving crates, sir," said Taylor and, with a quick salute, he headed over to round up a team.

"He's a good man to have around in a crisis," admitted Greyhorse with no little surprise. Jack guessed he'd assumed that the historical figure that Taylor practically was would have no practical use in an ultra-modern situation. Just went to show that everyone lived and learned.

Jack smiled as Greyhorse went to coordinate. "Tell the Doctor we'll be ready in time," he said. "Although he might want to decide what he wants to do with all of these Vikings?"

"I think he's working on something for it," Rose said. "But it may be as simple as bundling them all into the TARDIS and dropping them back home. I'll go on back, and tell him about Erik, too, now."

Jack nodded. "Good idea," he said.

It turned out that sailors were pretty much the same the Universe over, and throughout every period of time. The Synesthesian crew was liberally interspersed with Vikings and Americans and historical extras, and yet they all were tying knots, pulling at ropes, swearing, sweating, and losing their shirts. Jack was very, very happy with that, and tossed his shirt off over his head and off toward the TARDIS.

Then, someone from Taylor's crew started singing, "Haul on the bowline, before she starts rolling!" the line rang out.

The Americans laughed, and sang along. "Haul on the bowline, on the bowline haul!"

The song continued as Jack tied rope nets and secured wheel-carts to three more crates. It was a very old song, but as Jack found himself a place between Taylor and Greyhorse on one of the lines attached to the largest crate, he was truly surprised. "Haul on the bowline," sang Greyhorse, "Katie comes from Terra Two..."

"Some things never change," Jack murmured to Greyhorse as the verse passed on to yet another sailor.

"Nope, not a bit," Greyhorse agreed.

"Gotta keep the music simple for your boys?" Jack asked.

"No, we're trained to turn it off," Greyhorse said, referring to the talents that gave the Synesthesians their name. "Hard to function, as sensitive as we've gotten, seeing colors for every word in the language, and hearing every taste you can imagine. Why?"

"Nothing much, just want to try something." He grinned wolfishly and cleared his throat and then, in a tenor voice with a tone like a cello and as smooth as bottle glass, Jack sang, "Come all you young fellows that follows the sea..."

"Wey, hey, blow the man down," was the answering clarion. Jack had to stop long enough to laugh out loud before he could continue.


	14. Race Against Time

Rose got back into the control room just in time, apparently. "Woah," she said. "You said corridor was last, and that control's for the corridor."

The Doctor looked up at her and grinned. His face was pale, and he was definitely sweating, but he managed to look very happy to see her all the same. Rose worried that the painkillers he'd been using (whatever they were) were making him very ill. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"Course I am," the Doctor lied glibly. She could tell not only that he was lying but that he knew she would know it. He cut his eyes toward the small boy who really didn't need to know anything else but that they would take him right back to his mum and dad, and Rose got the point immediately. "An' I know this control's last. I'm tryin' ta rig 'em so's we can operate 'em by remote. Be better if we're halfway down the corridor, at least, before I close it."

"Good idea," Rose agreed. "Look, why don't you sit down for a minute, let me finish this?"

"Thought you failed Hullaballoo," the Doctor said. "This takes genius, precision..."

"Holding the sonic screwdriver over the panel 'til it falls off?" Rose suggested.

"No fair," the Doctor whinged. "I'm old an' tired an'..."

"Cranky?" Rose offered, stealing the sonic from where he was practically dropping it. "You kids sit over there and wait for me, yeah?" She leaned over the panel, locating the tiny rivets the Doctor had been sonicing loose and zapping the first carefully, murmuring soothingly as she worked. "Won't be a tick. Just need to save the world, and then we can go get ice cream or something, yeah?"

"Has she got ice cream?" Stanley asked the Doctor.

The Doctor shrugged at the kid. "Did last I checked, but Jack's been in th' kitchen since then. Still, we can be bribed, can't we, lad?"

"I guess," Stanley said, dubiously.

"Just a word of advice," the Doctor said conspiratorially, "pretty girls an' ice cream are good reasons ta save th' world."

Rose blushed at being called a pretty girl. She knew the Doctor considered her beautiful for a human (though she didn't know what difference being human made, if his people looked like hers), but it made her feel good to hear him say it all the same. She switched to the next panel in the row, looking a question at the drooping, wilting Time Lord before she started on it.

The Doctor nodded slowly, and turned back to Stanley. Before Rose really knew it, she was listening to the Doctor tell the story of how they took on the Jagrafess to this strange, clever little kid. She kept removing panels, occasionally stopping to get nods as she went.

Part of her wanted to whack him on the head, "So Rose goes off to keep her new pet monkey entertained...". Part of her wanted to hug him and tell him he was silly at once, "An' Rose was very clever, of course, asked all the right questions like she always does..."

"Is Rose your girlfriend?" Stanley asked, interrupting the Doctor somewhere between floor 16 and floor 500.

All of her wanted to know the answer to that question. She snuck a quick peek at the Doctor's face, to find him looking a little startled and a lot inexplicable. Unfortunately, she herself had to provide his usual hasty interruption and subject change. "Doctor?"

"Yeah, Rose?"

"Say I got all the panels off, and then the very last one started oozing goo. Would that be bad?"

"Could be," the Doctor said thoughtfully, standing rather slowly. "What sort of goo?"

"Sorta purplish, maybe? Smells a bit like Mum's cooking?"

"That's almost got to be bad," the Doctor said, moving somewhat more quickly toward the console. His eyes automatically scanned the panels and then his hand moved like lightning, snagging Rose's arm and jerking her behind him. "Run," he ordered sharply. "Take Stanley back to the TARDIS, now!"

"But, if it's poison..."

"It's not," the Doctor cut her off, "it just means the console's booby trapped an' I can't have you two in here while I sort it."

Rose still wanted to protest, had the words all piled up on the tip of her tongue, ready to let them fly forth when the Doctor grabbed her shoulders and forced her to look up at him. "Listen to me. As of right this second, everyone on this ship is in danger, and there are certain people here who cannot be risked." He cut his eyes toward Stanley, then looked a question at her to make sure she knew what he meant. Rose risked a nod, and the Doctor nodded back. "You remember what happened the last time somethin' got changed that shouldn't, right? I need you to make sure - make absolutely sure - that nothin' like that happens here, you got that?" He looked like he very much regretted having to bring her father's altered death up, but it didn't stop him.

"Yes, Doctor," Rose said gravely. She stared hard into his eyes, willing him to understand that he had better take care of himself.

He cupped her cheek gently, tilted her chin. Delighted, nervous anticipation sang through Rose's veins. He couldn't, could he? Would he? Surely... His thumb stroked slowly across her lip, an agonizingly tender gesture that was both too fast and too slow. She wanted to savor it forever, but it was taking too long, if it planned to lead to something else.

The panel behind him sparked and the Doctor jerked them both away, swearing in a snarling alien dialect, something about herd-animals and those who tended them, if Rose remembered right. "Take the boy an' run!" he snapped.

"You'd better be careful!" Rose snapped back, snatching up Stanley and settling him on her hip. "If you don't..."

"For you, all right?" the Doctor said insistently.

"Thank you," Rose said, and ran.

*?*

Jack looked up from his discussion with Greyhorse and Taylor about final preparations to the sound of an intercom crackling behind him. His head whipped around right and left as he tried to scan the room to find where that sound was coming from. Last he knew, the intercoms weren't working.

"Over here, Odin!" called young Erik, gesturing Jack to what he should have noticed first.

Jack cursed his eye for what felt like the thousandth time today as he dove for the bright green pie-wedge shaped control bank embedded in the bay wall near the door. "I hope this is a crank call," he said, disguising his seriousness with his light words and the cheery tone with which he delivered them.

"Sorry to wreck your fun, Captain," the Doctor's voice answered, sounding not the slightest bit apologetic - just terribly strained. "Th' space station's bobby trapped."

"Well, can't you untrap it?" Jack demanded.

"Could do, yeah," the Doctor replied blandly. "If I had about a day, and significantly less disasters goin' on, then yeah, no problem."

Jack drew a hasty deep breath and counted to ten in a few languages in his head. "All right, let's assume there'll still be the same number of disasters in a few minutes. What's all that mean?"

"Basically? Our time table's gone ta hell. I've got the shields blocking our scans offline, but I can't run 'em from here. That means they've gotta be run from the TARDIS. Plus, you're gonna need to coordinate with the Synesthesian ship because it an' Eldest are the only teleports you got. Make sure there's no one livin', except in the TARDIS or on that ship, Jack, you got me?"

Jack wanted to bang his head on the wall, actually. "Yeah, I got it. What do you want me to do with all the Vikings?"

The Doctor swore, softly, fluently, and creatively. He punctuated his sentence with, "Vikings!"

"Amen." It was a furtive and devout prayer, this one.

"Rose's on her way back, with Stanley," the Doctor said, finally. "She's ta get him safely settled inside the TARDIS. Tell 'er ta do the same with the Vikings, any ones who wanna go with Erik, anyway."

"Got it," Jack agreed.

The Doctor sounded hesitant as he added, "An' what about you, Jack?"

"What?" Jack asked.

"You know what," the Doctor replied, quietly.

Jack frowned. Seemed the Doctor was no better at goodbyes and potential goodbyes than Jack was. "I..." He decided to make up his mind at the last minute, then. "Right, that's the good news, what's the bad news?"

The Doctor chuckled ruefully. "That? You got fifteen minutes, tops."

It was Jack's turn to shout incredulous untranslated swearwords helplessly at the computer as the Doctor's voice and the indicator light cut out. He turned away from the panel just as the bay doors shushed open and Rose came charging inside, a scared (and slightly green) looking little boy on her hip. "Jack, did the Doctor..."

"Yeah, he told me," Jack cut Rose off.

"Sucks," Rose mused.

"Yeah."

*?*

The Doctor flashed the sonic screwdriver over the computer panels, trying with minimal success and increasing desperation to keep ahead of the cascading systems failures. "Jack!" he shouted at the intercom. "I need those scans, Captain, we're outta time!"

Rose's voice was the one that replied. "Jack had to go back to the Synesthesian ship," she said. "They picked up some sort of power coupling that Commander Greyhorse doesn't understand?"

She sounded dubious and the Doctor quickly programmed a patch between the station monitors and one of the TARDIS cameras to get a picture. When Rose's face appeared on the static filled viewer across the room from him, she was definitely chewing her lip nervously. "Where's Stanley? And Erik? Are you all right?"

"Stan's with Erik and his lot, and they're all in the gym. What d'you need me to do?"

The Doctor grinned, and wiped the sweat off his face with a handkerchief. He was going to be horribly ill when this was over, he just knew it. "On the keyboard, press every function key, starting at one and going up. Then the first and last ones at the same time."

The blurry viewer showed Rose fumbling with the keys and finally managing to follow the sequence he requested. "Right, it's done. Now what?"

"Look at the monitor, what do you see?"

"Um... this big blurry patch of green." She flicked it around on its stand so that it was as visible as it could be.

The Doctor strained to see it before finally resigning himself to the knowledge that he had absolutely no chance of handling it with just him and Rose this time. "Hang on a mo'," he said. "Gettin' Jack on the other line." He paused in his constant, hasty repairs to toggle the Synesthesian ship onto the screen. "Jack, I'm sorry," the Doctor said, "but I can't give you any more time. We're about to all be floating in forty different directions. Can you run a scan from there? Rose is on the line with us, an' we can say goodbye from here..."

Jack's image cleared itself up as he added power to the feed on his end. He looked very different from when he'd first joined them, in the Doctor's opinion, honest and brave and noble now. He was still as attractive as ever, of course, even with that jaunty, rakish eyepatch. The Doctor felt a twinge of guilt that he'd not been able to fix the boy's eye. Still, there were plenty of medical facilities in the time the Synesthesians came from that specialized in replaced organs that couldn't be differentiated from the original. It would be more painful and more time consuming, but he'd come out all right in the end.

Rose was stifling tears. The Doctor could hear her and that was making this harder on him in sympathy. "Jack, you have to be careful, yeah? And... you know, call us?" She was trying so hard to keep from sounding sad. "It's been so great to have you, you know, but you know we just want you to be happy."

"Doc, Rose, it's been really great," Jack said. He looked over his shoulder, then turned back to the screen, a sad but charming smile on his face. "But... I can't go with these folks."

Rose whooped with delight, and the Doctor would never have liked to admit to anyone how very relieved he felt to hear the news. There was one person, however, who didn't seem to know what to do. One of the blokes in the old American uniform stepped forward to take Jack's hand, give him a pleading, intense look. Impressive, that one, really. He was from too early in time to accept these kinds of emotions as wholly regular, and yet here the young man was, trying.

"Is this goodbye, then?" he asked Jack in a soft, confused voice.

The ex-Time Agent nodded. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'd hoped we'd have longer..."

"You could stay with us," the lad offered. "We need a leader, you know, even Commander Greyhorse thinks so."

Again Jack nodded. "And that's what you're here for," he said. "I know you're out of time, but that's why you and Greyhorse will make an excellent team. You don't need a captain."

"What if I need you?"

Jack smiled. "You won't," he whispered. "You're too good for me, anyway, Taylor." With those words, Jack cupped the cheeks of the other man and pressed a long, slow, deep kiss to the other man's lips. It went on for such a long time that the Doctor began to feel very much like an intruder.

When they finally broke it off, Rose tearfully proclaimed, "That was beautiful."

"Time, gentlemen," the Doctor reminded quietly.

"Right," said Jack. "I'll be on the next teleport back." He grinned beatifically. "It's been nice knowing all of you," he said.

On Rose's section of the screen, something very strange started to happen. The aqua blue console light started to slowly shift toward the red. "What does that mean?" she yelled.

"Time's up, Jack!" the Doctor shouted.

"Transporting now," Jack said.

"What do I do?" asked Rose, frantically.

The Doctor looked down at his repairs and realized what the TARDIS was trying to tell the world. He heard and felt it at the very same instant, as the Cloister Bell started to sound. Adrenaline and another wave of endorphins shot through his system. "I'll be right there," he explained.

Turning carefully to avoid what damage he could to his already destroyed ankle, the Doctor broke into a run. Behind him, like falling dominos, the consoles erupted one after the other in brightly-banded multicolored sparks.


	15. Excelsior

"The scan's clear, Doc," Jack said as the Doctor came charging into the TARDIS. "Just us and the Synesthesians."

"All right." The Doctor went to the keyboard and started tapping out commands, his large fingers suddenly graceful in ways that made Jack wish he was an inanimate object sometimes. "Commander Greyhorse?" he called to the viewer.

"Here, sir," said Greyhorse's image on the monitor. Rose grinned and waved adorably, Jack simply stood behind her, looking and feeling completely proud.

The Doctor was grinning as well as breathless, you could just hear it in his voice. "Fantastic," he said. "Right, I need you lot in that corridor immediately. Should hold it steady for us to pass if you're using it."

"How's that?" Rose asked, looking bewildered. Jack felt the same way, but thought the expression looked a bit better on her.

The Doctor's shoulders were slumped, his movements slow and wholly reluctant. Nevertheless, the Doctor looked Rose in the eye as he explained. "Somehow, the time corridor, Earth, and... the event that caused Eldest to be involved in the first place have all gotten tied up together."

Jack frowned as Rose's face came to mirror the Doctor's alarm. He couldn't even imagine what had gotten this space station and Earth tied together, but it was obviously painful for both of them to even think about. He decided to distract, since that was the Doctor's favorite way to play anyway. "So, the Synesthesian ship will serve as a lever?"

"Sorta, yeah," the Doctor agreed. "Now, Commander, this is the very important part. 'Less you wanna end up just another lost vessel, you need to exit the corridor - hard brake and deceleration burn, the lot - within the first ten seconds of the tunnel turnin' green."

"Time corridors turn green?" Jack wondered.

"They do to this lot," the Doctor said, gesturing at the viewer. "S'ta do with temporal harmonic resonance. Think you can remember that, Greyhorse?"

"Sure can, Doctor," came the reply. There was a grin. "Good to meet you. All of you."

"Bye," said Rose.

"Good luck," said Jack.

"Go!" ordered the Doctor, and broke the connection. His hands skidded across the controls. "Rose, hold those switches!"

Rose grabbed hold of the console and clung with one hand, her other one flipping a short row of switches and holding them down. "Is this gonna work?" she demanded as the central column jerked and juddered, and the dematerialization alert started on a wobbly, high-pitched whine.

"Jack, the stabilization controls."

Jack flung himself around the console, back to alternating the controls he'd been responsible for on their approach to the space station. The difference was, there wasn't a timed interval. They were flying an ancient time machine by the seat of their pants, when sane, normal people didn't even fly single pilot aircraft on their own.

Of course, Jack doubted any of them belonged in the same category as sane, normal people. He wasn't even sure the TARDIS had ever been sane, not even when she was new. In fact, he wasn't sure the TARDIS had ever been new.

Jack and Rose were, more or less, clinging for dear life. The Doctor was grinning like a lunatic, riding the temporal roller coaster like an expert cowboy wrangling a mad horse. "Point nine," he announced. "Point seven. Jack, when we hit naught point two, I need you to toggle those stabilizers to maximum. Point five."

Jack held himself poised as Rose clung to the controls she almost always handled, and the Doctor made minute adjustments on the keyboard before him. "Point four, point thrrrreee..." The old time engines screamed.

Everything felt very strange, like passing within range of a dwarf star, giving Jack the sensation of being mildly shrunken. Every atom that made up Jack's body seemed to be itching. The Doctor was, very definitely, glowing. So, as far as Jack could see, was Rose. "Point two five," the Doctor said. "There go the Synesthesians. Jack!"

"Holding steady," he called back.

"Point two," the Doctor said.

Jack toggled the stabilizers. The time rotor held steady, then plummeted, setting an ear-shattering noise loose throughout the ship. With another sound that somehow conveyed fierce triumph, the materialization sequence cut in.

For the second time that day, everything went white.

*?*

"We're back at the resort."

Rose hadn't even noticed the TARDIS had landed. She was far too busy tending to the Doctor. He'd fallen in the final moments, Rose thought, and had a cut on his forehead. He was also waxy pale and clammy. That was the reason she had her head on his chest, listening to his hearts beat steadily, and she didn't care who thought differently.

"Hey, Doc," said Jack, and he sounded closer this time, "what're we doing back at the... woah, what the hell happened to him?"

"He was injured..."

"He looks bad, Rose," Jack said carefully. "I thought Time Lords couldn't die, but..."

"His hearts are beating just fine," Rose insisted, "and if you'll just listen instead of panicking? He got hurt early in all this, and he's been taking some kind of painkiller. But it's been making him sick, since he had to take so much and..."

"Don't worry about it," the Doctor interrupted. "I'll be fine..."

Rose chuffed a protest.

"Yeah, you look like a corpse, there, Doc," Jack concurred. "Why don't you stay put? What do you want done?"

"I want to finish this," the Doctor said blearily and staggered to his feet. "Erik!" he called.

The young Viking, wild-eyed but resolute, appeared in the doorway to the console room. An equally wild-eyed Stanley and one of the Americans came with the Viking chief, the little boy looking so pale, Rose couldn't help it in the slightest when she immediately scooped him up.

"What is your wish, Mighty Thor?" Erik the Viking asked.

"Got a few more of your lot to round up, then we're gonna try to get you home. You need some help?"

"I'll go with him," Jack offered.

"I and my greatest warriors could never equal your might, powerful Odin," said Erik in his strongest tone, "but a dozen of us could ease your work."

"True," Jack agreed with a grin. "And if we look impressive enough, maybe we can put an end to the killing for now. Dying in war is one thing. Dying because of confusion is something else entirely - and utterly unwelcome."

"As the All-Father commands," Erik agreed and trooped off with Smith at his side to collect a few friends.

Rose shifted Stanley onto her hip and guided the Doctor to the jumpseat. "You need to rest," she insisted.

"Just a few more minutes, I promise," the Doctor insisted right back.

"I wanna go home now," said Stanley softly. "I'm tired and I didn't get any ice cream."

The Doctor grinned. "Right, I knew we'd forgot something!" he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. "C'mon, let's leave Jack and the Vikings to clean up after their lot for once. We'll go get ice cream instead."

"Is that wise?" Rose asked, looking him over.

"Chocolate's good for Time Lords, time travelers, and tiny New Yorkers. I think we're all good." Rose, unable to help herself, beamed at him as he took her hand and tugged her off toward the kitchen.

*?*

"Well, this isn't what I had in mind," the Doctor said of the vast forest surrounding the newly arrived TARDIS. "It's definitely around your time period, I s'pose, though I don't think it's where you're meant to be."

"It matters not," said Erik, studying the trees with bright-eyed admiration. "This is where our gods have brought us and this is where we will dwell."

His warriors, looking rather sea-sick to a man, all cheered their approval of the plan. The Doctor suspected they'd approve any plan that didn't involve them having to get back on the TARDIS.

He took a quick look at the time lines and chuckled. "All right," he said. "That lake there leads to other lakes, and eventually to a river that reaches the ocean. There're native tribes in almost any direction you can go, so you'll find help, competition, possibly girls who'll put up with you. Don't forget ta leave me a note, an' we'll leave ya to it."

"We would make you obeisance, worship, sacrifice," Erik protested.

"Oh no," the Doctor chided. "No, there're too few of you to make sacrifice for many years, Erik Odinswarder. You and your people here have a bit to accomplish, I'd say, an' we know where ya are an' what you're doing. Ya don't need ta send people to remind us."

"I'd say it's mine, this one," said Rose. "Be fruitful and multiply and all that, right?"

"As the goddess Sif commands me," Erik said, a sparkle in his bright eyes. He was definitely looking forward to this like an adventure, anyone could see the giddy excitement in his eyes.

And the Vikings and Smith the American sailor set off into the wilderness of...

"Where are we, anyway?" Rose asked as she and the Doctor reentered the TARDIS.

"Wisconsin," the Doctor replied. "Well, eventually Wisconsin."

Rose crinkled her nose while Jack, sitting with a drowsy Stanley nodding off in his lap, looked at the Doctor like he was insane. The Time Lord chuckled. "Been legends of European folk marryin' in to half the Native tribes on this continent. Some of it's just garbage, ignorance, or propaganda. Some of it, though, isn't as easily explained. Random Viking inscriptions, maybe even the Kensington Runestone, could be Erik's work, or his descendants, maybe."

"Yeah, but our lot got washed into the Caribbean, remember," Rose said.

"Not quite the Caribbean," the Doctor protested.

"He's never Erik the Red, is he?" Rose wondered.

The Doctor gave her his very best "oh, you stupid ape" look. He felt she'd earned it this time, though he didn't really have the energy to explain it all, for once. "How would he ever be Erik the Red? He's as blond as a wheat field, our Erik."

Rose put her hands on her hips, looking all indignant and adorable. The Doctor suddenly missed her hair, as it was too short and ragged now to fan out when she tossed her head. "Well, you're always saying history got this bit and that bit wrong, why not the bit about the color of some bloke's hair or other?"

"Where are we going, now?" Jack asked, apparently in an attempt to forestall what he perceived to be an impending argument.

"We got one last stop ta make," the Doctor said. "Two, maybe." The TARDIS touched down and, feeling disgustingly nauseous, desperate to get this over with, and still reluctant to see the child go, the Doctor checked to be sure of the coordinates.

Convinced, the Doctor reached and took Stanley from Jack, smiling gently as the little boy looked at him with a wobbly, tired smile. "Hey there, Stan," he said softly.

"Hi," Stanley answered sleepily.

Rose gave him an oddly wrenching look over the child's head and came over to lay her hand on the Doctor's shoulder. He welcomed the warm support, as he was sinking fast. He'd gotten really attached to the kid, and far too quickly, too. Of course, this one had something to do later.

"Ya know that sometimes we have very important dreams, right?" the Doctor said.

"S'pose," Stanley offered with a yawn.

"Good enough," the Doctor said. "Those dreams, those ideas, they can affect us forever. But even so, we don't always remember them."

"Yeah," the kid agreed. "I used to dream I could fly. I think."

"This is one of those kinda dreams, my lad," the Doctor said. "That's the great enigma, the whole dichotomy of the psyche - some of the most vital and distinguishing things in our lives are the things we can never recall."

The little boy nodded with wide-eyed solemnity. The Doctor grinned back. "Right then, Stanley, it's time you were off in the arms of Morpheus. When you wake up, all this'll have just been a very strange adventure for your subconscious."

Mesmerism was one of those skills that came and went with his regenerations. Nevertheless, the Doctor always had the basics of it, and it was almost too easy to use it on a sleeping child. "Come with me?" he invited Rose.

"Sure," she said, like always.

It was a matter of moments to find the right flat and return the sleeping Stanley to the arms of his confused mother. Psychic paper and pretending to be police made it quick and virtually painless, at least for the boy. The Doctor suspected that melancholy look Rose wore was reasonably well matched by his own.

"How'd he ever get caught up in this in the first place?" Rose demanded as they returned to the TARDIS. She might have been trying to distract him, and it might just be working.

The Doctor set the coordinates, wobbling and fighting to stay upright the whole way. "Some sort of time corridor let out in the vicinity. Might be something to think about later, but it's irrelevant now. Point is, the working corridor intersected the broken one, since it was prob'ly made by the same sort o' time machine. The connection between the broken one an' the space station made them fold together..." Rose gave him her best, 'you're a mad alien' look, and Jack didn't look like he had any more idea what he was talking about than Rose. The Doctor sighed and ordered the ship to dematerialize, which she did without so much as a hiccup. The TARDIS was feeling sorry for him, obviously.

Rose cleared her throat and the Doctor sighed again. "Our Stanley was in the wrong place at the wrong time... or, I guess the right place at the right time in this case. Guess he was s'posed to be caught, really."

"You used a really complex explanation there at the end," Jack said. "Lot of concepts I don't think a kid his age would understand."

"A very wise man once said, 'If a kid has to go to a dictionary, that's not the worst thing that could happen.'"

Jack nodded. "Good quote," he agreed. "Who said it?"

The Doctor grinned. "He did," he answered, nodding toward the door of the TARDIS, and the past that once again correctly included their recent guest. "I'm gonna leave her to the piloting, I think. Jack, you got a drug you need to take, but I'm not in any fit state to give it to you."

"What do you need?" Rose asked.

"Gonna hafta purge my system," the Doctor said. "Made myself a little sick, here..." He staggered off toward the med bay without further explanation.

*?*

Jack watched with amusement as Rose's face turned red and her lip curled a little. She balled her hands into fists and stalked off after the Doctor. From the look of things, Jack guessed she was going to force feed the Time Lord a piece of her mind to choke on.

He got up and followed her, in case he needed to referee. He was slowed down a bit by the TARDIS hiding the med bay door from him, which he supposed was her way of saying that the two would be fine. He found the bay three corridors over from where it usually was, just in time to see Rose pushing the Doctor back down into a rather complicated looking chair. She was obviously on her second or third attempt, because she was winded.

"Stop being such a great big baby!" she snapped, her little hand on the Doctor's chest. "That boot's gotta come off, and it's only coming off with scissors. Give it a rest and sit still before I figure out how these restraint thingees work, yeah?"

Jack laughed out loud. "He might enjoy that, Rose," he said suggestively, and put a firm hand on the Doctor's shoulder to keep him in place. "Need a hand?" he offered.

"No, I'm fi..." the Doctor started.

"Right, that's it," Rose cut him off. "Didn't want to have to do this, but did I tell you I did a report on Vikings for my GCSEs?"

The Doctor went even paler than he already was, which was impressive because Jack thought he'd looked nearly dead already. "Do tell," Jack invited.

"Yeah, I did. Turns out, no one in my time knows for sure what Sif was goddess of, even though they know she was Thor's wife." The girl flashed Jack a wicked grin, and the Doctor a triumphant one. "So I asked Erik, 'cuz I was curious. He said you told them I was Sif, you know, Doctor."

The Doctor stammered the beginnings of several sketchy words. Jack barely repressed the urge to snicker at him.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Rose said. "And if you don't sit still and do as you're told, you can just explain how you told all the Vikings I was your wife - and a goddess of fertility, I might add - to my mum."


End file.
